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REMINISCENCES 



OF 



JAMES C. AYER 



AND THE 



TOWN OF AYER. 



'•UNDERTAKE WHAT YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH, AND ACCOMPLISH 
WHAT YOU UNDERTAKE.'"— JAMES c. ayek. 



BY CHx^RLES (.ROWLEY, 



Author of " Leaves From a Lawyer's Life Afloat and Ashore," " History of 
Lowell,'' " Famous Divorces of all Ages," etc., etc 



SECOND EDITION 



PRINTED BY THE 

Penh j Printing Company, No. 12 Middle Street, 

LOWELL, MASS. 



/ 

REMINISCENCES 



OF 



JAMES C. AYER 



AND THE 



TOWN" OF AYER. 



"UNDERTAKE WHAT YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH, AND ACCOMPLISH 
WHAT YOU UNDERTAKE. "—JAMES c. ayer. 



BY CHARLES COWLEY, 

Author of "Leaves From a Lawyer'S'^Lipe Afloat and Ashore," "^History of 
Lowell," " Famous Divorces of all Ages," etc., etc 



SECOND EDITION. 



PRINTED BY THE 

Penhallow Printing Company, No. 12 Middle Street, 

LOWELL, MASS. 






AFfI 22 1916 



TO 



J 



E'f^I^S'li^vlCE I'SXKlNGr &^%% 



i:c- c- ■;::- << j^g ^^s a man of power. Whatever his hand found 
to do, he did it with his might. He carried great force into every 
iDOvement which he made. But now this strong man is laid low. 
"'How are the mighty fallen!'" — From Remarks at Mr. Ayers 
Ftmeralin St. AiDies Church, by the Rev. Theodore Edson, D. D. 

" But vain the voice of wail 
For thee, from this dim vale of sorrow fled — 

Earth has no spell whose magic shall not fail 
To light the gloom that shrouds thy narrow bed, 

Or woo thee from the dead. 

Then take thy long repose 
Beneath the shelter of the deep green sod : 

Death but a brighter halo o'er thee throws — 
Thy fame, thy soul, alike have spurned the clod — 

Rest thee in God." . 
— From Horace Greeley s Ode on the Death of William Wirt. 



« m»» » 

Some of the "Reminiscences" contained in the following- 
pages were read by the Author at the Tenth Annual Meeting 
of the Old Residents' Historical Association, held in Lowell, 
May 8th, 1879. 

Immediately afterwards, the Author received invitations 
from members of that Association to give more of these "Rem- 
iniscences" at the next Quarterly Meeting. Others, not mem- 
bers of that body, expressed a desire to hear these "Reminis- 
cences " without unnecessary delay. Finally, towards the close 
of June, the following flattering letter was received : 
To Judge Charles Cowley, 
Dear Sir : — 

Not having had an opportunity to listen to 
your "Reminiscences of James C. A.yer," before tltQ Old Resi- 
dents' Association, and believing that many others would be as 
much gratified as ourselves to hear your estimate of our late 
distinguished fellovs^-citizen, whose career you have reviewed, we 
respectfully invite you to repeat your able and interesting dis- 
course in Huntington Hall at such time as may be convenient. 
Lowell, June 24th, 1879. 

Francis Jewett, J. P. Folsom, 

Joseph R. Hayes, Charles A. Savory, 

H. R. Barker, Erastus Boyuen, 



PREFATORY. 



S. G. Mack, 
C. A. R. DiMON, 
A. G. Cumnock, 
Nathan Allen, 
J. Tyler Stevens, 
Robert B. Caverly, 
E. B. Patch, 
T. R. Garity, 
George F. Lawton, 
John A. Goodwin, 
Alfred G. Lamson, 
Frederic Holton, 



J. Bancroft, 
Jeremiah Clark, 
J. C. Abbott, 
Charles F. Howe, 
James P. Campbell, 
F. T. Greenhalge, 
John F. Frye, 
L. E. Shepard, 
A. M. Bartlett, 
Charles S. Lilley, 
J. D. Pedrick, 
[and many others ]. 



In compliance with this invitation, I gave the substance of 
these "Reminiscences," (which were, however, much curtailed in 
the delivery, for want of time,) at a meeting in Huntington Hall, 
an account of which will be found in the Appendix. 

I have added a few pages relating to the town of Ayer, as 
an appropriate supplement to my reminiscences of the man ; — 
also, a sketch of Mr. Southwick, the father-in-law of Mr. Ayer, 
who was intimately associated with him in many enterprises. 

Lowell, July 12th, 1879. 

CHARLES COWLEY. 



REMINISCENCES 



OF 



JAMES COOK AYER. 



e\S*c N the hill-country of Connecticut, some seven miles east 
"^^5 of Norwich and on the road to Mystic, lies the rough-hewn 
town of Groton. Adjoining it is another town — LED YARD 
— which sprang from the loins of Groton in 1836* 

One is struck chiefly by the great scarcity of human dwell- 
ings, and the irregular and forlorn appearance of "all the region 
round about." The hand of man has made apparently no im- 
pression upon the rock-ribbed hills, or upon the hard and sterile 
soil leaving Nature clothed in the vesture which she wore at 
the creation. 

The traveller in the region of Ledyard may have journeyed 
for miles without seeing any human habitation, when suddenly 
his attention is attracted to a small, antique, ground-story cot- 
tage, with nothing above the kitchen but an attic, situated upon 
a rising knoll by the roadside, and overlooking a valley through 

♦For an account of the towns of Ledyard and Groton, see Miss Caulkins' 
History of New London. 



lo rf:miniscences of james c. ayer 

which a noiseless brook makes its way to the Thames, — all com- 
bining to form a landscape at once rugged and picturesque. 

It was while riding with Edward Everett through a town 
like Ledyard, that Henry Clay inquired, naturally enough : — 
" In Heaven's name, Everett, how do your constituents live ? I 
see nothing about here to support either man or beast." " Why 
Mr. Clay," replied Everett, "don't you see that tree out there, 
in the middle of the field?" "I do," said Clay; "and a poor, mean 
miserable specimen of a tree it is. It looks dead. There isn't 
a leaf on it. It isn't fit for fire wood." "Ah!" replied Everett, 
" but it makes capital wooden nutmegs." 

These constituents of Mr. Everett, — men of Middlesex, — 
lived by their wits ; the very barrenness of their soil stimulating 
their brains and developing industry in a thousand different 
forms. Had Mrs. Barbauld been in that carriage with Clay and 
Everett, she might well have quoted to them her own immor- 
tal ^lines : — 

"Man is the nobler growth our realms supply,"^ 
And souls are ripened in our northern sky." 
For more than a century this little Ledyard brook has 
driven a saw-mill and grist-mill, the tumbling remains of which 
may still be seen. In the early part of this century, this 
saw-mill, this grist-mill, and the little farm on which they stand, 
together with a blacksmith's shop, a wheelwright's shop and a ci- 
der-mill, were carried on by Frederick Ayer, the father of the 
subject of these reminiscences. 

In the last war with Great Britain, Frederick Ayer served 
for a time in Colonel Belcher's regiment of Connecticut militia, 
following the example of ^ his father, Elisha Ayer, who was a 
soldier in the War of the Revolution. 

Until about that time, the manufacture of cotton, wool and 
flax, in this country, had been carried on almost exclusively in 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AY1':R. ir 

private families. The introduction of the fulling-mill, the card- 
ing-machine, the spinning-jenny, and the power-loom, transfer- 
red this branch of industry, part by part, from the cottage to the 
factory.* The weaving was the last, and the spinning the last 
but one, of these processes, thus transferred. 

When the famous Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts of 
Congress, and finally the War of i8i2,f had closed the ports, 
of the United States to the fabrics of Great Britain, Frederick 
Ayer, in common with many other enterprising men possessed 
of water-power, turned his attention eagerly to the woollen 
manufacture; and now a carding-mill was started, driven by the 
same undershot water-wheel which drove his saw-mill and his 
grist-mill. 

Frederick Ayer married Persis Cook, a daughter of James 
Cook of Preston, (a town adjoining Ledyard,) and sister of the 
James Cook who was afterwards, for many years, agent of the 
Middlesex Company's mills, and Mayor of Lowell, This broth- 
er-in-law, James Cook, had been a comrade of Frederick Ayer 
under Colonel Belcher ; and a few months since, at the age of 
eighty-four, his name was enrolled upon the Pension List ■ of 
the War of 1S12. 

In this rugged and^ secluded spot, in that part of Groton\ 
which afterwards took the name of the famous traveller, Ledyard,. 
sheltered by the hills and rocks, and far from the busy haunts. 
of men, five children were born to Frederick and Persis. 
Ayer, viz : — 



* Bishop's History of American Manufactures, vol. 1, pp. 30o, 304, 307 
308-323, 331-341, 372-390, 308-419 ; vol. 2, pp. 1.50, 194 ; Contributions of thfr 
Old Residents' Historical Association, Lowell, vol. 1, pp. 243, 244. 

tBenton's Thirty Years' View, vol. 1, p. 3; Bishop's History of Ameri- 
can Manufactui*es, vol. 2, pp. 178, 181. 



12 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

Albert Ayer, who died in infancy. 

JAMES COOK AYER, born May 5th, 1818. 

Fannie Ayer, who died in childhood. 

Frederick Ayer, now of Lowell. 

Lovisa Ayer, wife of Arden Moffit, of Cromwell, Iowa. 

From his birth till 1825, the boy James remained under the 
paternal roof, where, before he had learned to read, his memory 
was filled with stories, told by the blazing fireside during the 
long evenings of winter, of his father's, and his uncle's, experi- 
ence in the War of 181 2 ; of his grandfather's experience in the 
War of the Revolution, and of the earlier and more barbarous 
conflicts in that region, in which the Pequot tribe of Indians 
was harried from the earth. Mashantucket, the last retreat of 
the Pequot Indians, was in what is now Ledyard, and I know no 
region in America richer in Indian and Revolutionary memories 
than that around Ledyard and Groton. 

The memory of the famous Pequot sachem, Sassacus, can 
never become extinct in Groton ; for it was there, in Fort Mys- 
tic, that his power was broken, and upwards of six hundred of 
his warriors put to death. Not far distant, where the city of 
New London now stands, the Pequot sachems made their prin- 
cipal rendezvous ; and at Norwich, nearer still, repose the ashes 
of the gallant Miantonomo, whom Mr. Drake, "••'■ as well as Mr. 
Ayer, called "the Indian Napoleon," who was barbarously mur- 
dered, rather by the Colonial powers than by Uncas, to whose 
vengeance he was basely delivered. 

Naturally enough, the warmest sympathies of the ardent 
boy were deeply enlisted in behalf of Miantonomo and Sassacus 
and more than once in his later years, 1 have heard him expati- 
ate on their heroic qualities, and pour upon their destroyers a 
stream of cold, cutting, blistering sarcasm not unworthy of Vol- 



*Drake's TJook of the Indians : Miss Caulkins' History of Norwich. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 13 

taire ; for which, (as I once reminded him,) he would have been 
put in "the bilboes," if he had spoken thus of the fathers of 
New England in their own time. The stealing of the stones of 
Miantonomo's monument at Norwich, for use in building, he de- 
nounced as little better than sacrilege. 

Among the marvellous stories that were told by the same 
fireside, were those of the travels in Europe, Asia, Africa, and 
America, of the boy's own townsman, John Ledyard, ■■•'■■ the com- 
panion of the celebrated Captain James Cook, and chronicler of 
one of his voyages ; and those, also, of Colonel William Led- 
yard, who withstood the traitor. General Arnold, so stoutly at 
Fort Griswold.f and who, after surrendering himself and the 
handful of his command who survived the terrible encounter, as 
prisoners of war, was run through by his captors with his own 
sword, and thus put to a death which the laws of war stigmatize 
as a murder. 

When seven years old, he lost his father by death ; and the 
cottage in which he first saw the light, with his father's saw- 
mill, grist-mill and carding-mill, passed to other hands. His 
widowed mother took a tenement in her father's house in Pres- 
ton, three miles distant, where she remained two years, keeping 
house with her children. 

While living at Preston with his mother's father, whose 
name he. bore, James Cook Ayer took great delight in visiting 
his father's father, Elisha Ayer, who lived some two miles 
distant. He spent one winter with him, and went to school in 
what is known as "the old red school house"' on Preston plains. 
This village school-house stands solitary and alone, in the cen- 
tre of an immense plain, and bears evidence of great age. The 

* See Sparks' Life of John Ledyard. 

t Fort Griswold is in Groton. See Hollister's History of Connecticut, 
vol. 2, chap. 17: ]\Iiss C.iiilUius' History of New London, chap. 32. 



14 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

unacquainted traveller is tempted to stop and gaze on this quaint 
and antique structure, and wonder, perhaps, how many men, 
Avhose names are now familiar to the world, gathered their first 
ideas beneath its humble roof. 

This grandfather Ayer had a son named h-om himself, who 
exerted no small influence over the plastic and impressionable 
mind of his nephew. 

Like several other members of the family, this uncle, Eli- 
sha Ayer, was a very superior man. He had lived eight years 
in Spain, and was one of the first importers of the famous 
Spanish Merino sheep into this country. These sheep were 
then worth from a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars apiece in 
the United States.* In this enterprise he was associated with 
the ingenious but unfortunate Plowden Halsey, who lost his life, 
during the war of i8i2, in an attempt to blow up a British man- 
of-warf by a sub-marine torpedo, in the harbor of New London. 

When he was nine years old, his mother took a tenement 
in the house of her brother, Isaac Cook, in Preston ; but James 
remained, for three years, with his grandfather Cook, who was 
struck with the precocious brightness of the boy. 

His grandfather Cook, like his own father, who had died, 
had engaged early in the flannel manufacture, and in his grand- 
father's carding mill James Cook Ayer worked, attending some- 
times the picker, sometimes the cards, and sometimes at "roller- 
joining ;" that is, piecing together the strands that came from the 
cards, as they were spun on " the jenny." 

When ele\-en years old he made a contract with his grand- 
father to attend the picker for four cents an hour. This was 

*Yet Dr. Bishop makes no mention of Elislia Ayer, in his History of 
American Mainifiictures, vol. 1, p. 417: vol. 2, pp. 135, 136, 171, 2i'.">. 

fProbably, the " Kamillies," tlie riaa-ship of Commodore Hardy, who then 
blockaded New London. Hardy had previously commanded the " Victory," 
the flag-ship of Lord Nelson, at the famous 1)attle of Trafalgar. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 15 

doubtless well meant on his grandfather's part ; but it was un- 
fortunate for the boy, whose ambition far exceeded his physical 
powers. Connecticut had no law, such as most states now have, 
to protect children in the factories against either their own 
readiness, or the .greediness of their parents or employers, to 
overtask their powers. This anxious and aspiring boy actually 
worked twenty hours a day on his ^grandfather's picker, (and 
thereby perhaps shortened his life by many years,) in order to 
earn four cents an hour. It was not from mere selfishness that 
he did this : for when he had saved about fourteen dollars out 
of his earnings, he lent it to his grandfather, taking a note for 
that amount, bearing interest — mark his early care to ha\'e his 
money earning more money ; — and then made a present of this 
interest-bearing note to his widowed mother. 

It was not his mother's wish that he should thus overtask 
his powers, though, at that time, she herself was engaged in 
Avorking in the mill. Many a night, indeed, she lay in anxious 
restlessness, unable to sleep, fearing some accident to her boy, 
who remained night after night alone in the mill, attending that 
picker for his four cents an hour. He seldom quitted his picker 
till midnight. There was one night which, after the lapse of 
fifty years, lives to-day in the memory of his mother, as vividly 
as if it were yesterday. One o'clock struck, but the familiar 
footstep fell not upon her ear. The clock struck two ; and still 
he came not. Another hour passed, as slowly as if it had been 
a century ; but still he did not come. Then she was sure some- 
thing had happened. He must have been hurt — perhaps killed 
— torn — mangled — by that fearful, devouring picker ! She could 
no longer bear the pgony of suspense. Calling up her father 
and her brother, she and they went together to the little mill. 
" The blackness of darkness " prevailed all around it. The ac- 
customed light had disappeared. The mill was locked up ; but 



i6 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

the water had not been shut off from the wheel ; and the roar of 
that picker — more terrible then to her than all the cannon of 
Gettysburg — seemed louder than ever before. When they had 
forced their way into the mill, walking up to the picker in the 
darkness, they saw at first nothing of the boy. Feeling around 
for the fragments of his body, — for, by this time, they felt sure 
he had been dragged through the picker and killed, — they found 
him, at last, lying asleep upon the mill floor, where he had sunk 
some hours before, utterly exhausted and overpowered by his 
protracted toil. 

When twelve years old, his hunger and thirst for learning- 
became uncontrollable. He could not, and would not, be con- 
tent with his hard condition and with the prospect of remaining 
therein. Again and again he threatened to run away, unless his 
mother did something to secure an education for him. Finally, 
his efforts succeeded : and his mother sent him for six months 
to school at Norwich, where he had about fifty other boys for his 
companions, and where he evinced a determined purpose to ex-- 
eel them all in his studies, and to stamp his footprints deeply in 
the sands of time. 

A Mr. Fuller, a country merchant of Norwich, then se- 
lected him, out of all the boys in that school, for his clerk. He 
remained in that store about one year, boarding in Mr. Fuller's 
family. The Indian traditions, which he had received in Led- 
yard, were again and again rehearsed to him while in Norwich,, 
where he often visited, in pensive mood, the monuments of 
Uncus and Miantonomo. 

Still he continued restless; he wanted an education, and 
could not live without it. Driven to distraction by his importu- 
nities, his mother wrote to her oldest brother, James Cook, 
at Lowell, requesting him to take his nephew and namesake, 
and give him an education, Mr. Cook acceded to this request,. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 17 

and on a memorable day in the autumn of 1836, James Cook 
Ayer alighted from the Worcester stage-coach at the American 
House in Lowell, and hurried with bounding step to the house 
of his uncle on Hurd street. 

It is a coincidence not unworthy of mention, that Elias 
Howe, the inventor of the famous lock-stitch sewing-machine, 
took up his abode in Lowell in the same year.'^'-" 

Seven years before that, there came to Lowell another am- 
bitious boy, whose name, like his own, will not be forgotten for 
centuries, and who has given us a pen-picture of the nascent 
city as he first viewed it from the summit of Christian Hill.f I 
refer, of course, to General Benjamin F. Butler, who was some- 
times Mr. Ayer's coadjutor, but more often his antagonist during 
his active life of forty years in Lowell. 

Of Lowell, as young Ayer first saw it, no account has been 
left by him. But the accomplished French statesman, Michel 
Chevalier, who visited Lowell in 1834, and gave "the Manches- 
ter of America " her first introduction to Europe, in the Jotirnal 
des Debats, hasjeft us a description of " the City of Spindles," 
which Mr. Ayer often praised as true to the life : — 

" A pile of huge factories, each five, six, or seven stories 
high, and capped with a little white belfry, which strongly con- 
trasts with the red masonry of the building, and is distinctly 
projected on the dark hills in the horizon. By the side of these 
larger structures rise numerous little wooden houses, painted 

*Cowley's History of Lowell, p. 114. Elias Howe worked in a Lowell 
Machine Shop. Among those who worked in the same shop and boarded 
in the same boarding-house with Howe, was Natliauiel P. Banks, since 
Speaker of the House, Governor of the State, Major-General, etc. 

tSee Butler's Semi-Ceutennial Oration at Lowell, March 1, 187(1, pp. 37- 
4 ; Middlesex County Manual, pp. 136, 141. 

This semi-centennial celebration was the last public meeting which Mr.. 
Ayer ever attended in Lowell. 



i8 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

white, with green bhnds, very neat, very snug, very nicely car- 
peted, and with a few small trees around them, or brick houses 
in the English style, that is to say, simple, but tasteful without, 
and comfortable within ; on one side, fancy-goods shops and 
milliners' rooms without number, (for the women'"''" are the ma- 
jority in Lowell,) and vast hotels in the American style, very 
much like barracks ; on another, canals, water-wheels, water- 
falls, bridges, banks, schools, and libraries ; and there are no less 
than seven journals printed here. All around are churches and 
meeting-houses of every sect. Episcopalian, Baptist, Congrega- 
tionalist, Methodist, Universalist. Unitarian, &c., and there is 
also a Roman Catholic chapel. 

" Here are all the edifices of a flourishing town in the Old 
World, except the prisons, hospitals, and theatres ; everywhere 
is heard the noise of hammers, of spindles, of bells calling the 
hands to their work, or dismissing them from their tasks, of 
coaches and six arriving and starting off, of the blowing of rocks 
to make a mill-race or to level a road ; it is the peaceful hum of 
an industrious population, whose movements are regulated like 
clock-work ; a population not native to the town, and one-half of 
which at least will die elsewhere, after having aided in founding 
three or four other towns ; for the full-blooded American has 
this in common with the Tartar, that he is encamped, not estab- 
lished, on the soil he treads upon. ■■•'" * * 

" This part of the country ■•'•■ * ■"■'■ is rugged, rocky, moun- 
tainous, and bleak, consisting in fact of the first ridges of the 
Alleghanies, which extend hence to the Gulf of Mexico, contin- 
ually receding from the Atlantic as they stretch southwards. 

*The female population ot Lowell, lietween the ages of 15 and 2.5 years, 
corresponded, at that time, to a total population of from ."iOjOOO to GO, 000 souls. 
By the census of 187.5, the population of Lowell was — males, 21,803 ; females, 
27,71)5; total, 4!l,G88. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 19 

The inhabitants have an extraordinary mechanical genius ; they 
are patient, attentive, and inventive, and they must succeed in 
manufactures ; or rather they have already succeeded, and Low- 
ell is a miniature Manchester. ••'•■ •••' •■'•■ 

" Lowell, with its steeple-crowned factories, resembles a 
Spanish town with its convents ; but with this difference, that in 
Lowell, you meet no rags nor Madonnas, and that the nuns of 
Lowell, instead of working sacred hearts, spin and weave cotton, 
l^owell is not amusing, but it is neat, decent, peaceable, sage. "■■'•' 

More than thirty years later, although, in the mean time, 
M. Chevalier had, (as he himself frankly told me, in Paris, in 
1868,) changed the standpoint from which he viewed many so- 
cial and political questions, — he still retained " the first impres- 
sion of pleasure caused by the sight of the town, new and fresh 
like an opera scene." In his Introduction to the Reports of the 
International Juries of the Universal Exposition of 1867, Cpage 
410,) M. Chevalier refers to the manufactories " de la celebre 
ville de Lowell, a 40 kilometres de Boston," in the following com- 
inendatory terms, which Mr. Ayer was among the first to criti- 
cise as evincing, on the part of M. Chevalier, a surprising ignor- 
ance of the great changes which had taken place in the factory 
population of Lowell since he first bounded with elastic step 
■over its primitive, pine-board sidewalks : — 

Ces manufactures sont les plus remarquables du monde, 
par le soin qui y est pris de la moralite et du bienetre des pop- 
ulations ouvrieres, et par la sollicitude infatigable avec laquelle 
ces populations ellesmcmes veillent a la fois sur leurs propres 
moeurs et sur leurs propres enterets. 

[TRANSLATION.] 

"These manufactories are the most remarkable in the world, 
from the care which is there taken of the morals and well-being 
of the working people, and from the unwearied solicitude with 
*See Chevalier's Letters from the United States, pp. 128-14-t. 



20 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

which these people themselves watch, at the same time, over 
their own morals, and their own interests." 

Such was Lowell when this bright, blue-eyed boy from Con- 
necticut saw, for the first time, its steeple-crowned temples ded- 
icated to the Divinity of Labor ; little dreaming how closely, and 
how conspicuously, and in how many different ways, his name 
would thereafter be associated with this bee-hive of industry, 
not only during his own brief span of life, but for many gener- 
ations to come. 

A few days afterwards, Mr. Cook rode in the stage-coach 
to Westford, and placed his nephew in the Westford Academy, 
under the charge of the late Rev. Ephraim Abbott, in whose 
family he boarded.* The testimony of his teacher and of all his 
companions at Westford shows him to have been a close and 
untiring student, protracting his studies, as he had formerly done 
his picker-work, far into the night. He remained in Westford 
Academy only one year ; but that year was more to him than two 
or three years to many others. From that school have gone sev- 
eral superior men — such as Henrys F. Durant, William F. Smith 
and General J. J. Dana. Of young Ayer's contemporaries there, 
I know none who were quite equal in mental calibre to himself ; 
but he formed some friendships there, which, like all his friend- 
ships, and some of his enmities, ended only when the mortal re- 
mains were borne across Concord River to the City of the Dead. 

Meantime, his mother had need of his services, and at the 
end of the year, he returned to her in Norwich. But if the hum- 
drum life of Norwich was irksome to him before, it was utterly 
intolerable now ; and he chafed to be back with his uncle in 
Lowell. 

* lu his later years rreceptor Abbott used to sliow a Japanese razor, 
presented to him by Mr. Ayer long after he had quitted Westford, the con- 
stant use of which kept his quondam pupil in pleasant and perpetual 
remembrance. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 21 

Just at this time, Mr. and Mrs. Cook lost their daughter, 
Mary, the last of their five children ; and, in their desolation and 
sorrow, they yearned to have with them once more the bright, 
bustling nephew whom they had had with them or near them 
during the previous year. What happened next when there was 
a fatherless boy in search of a home, on the one side, and an 
uncle and an aunt in search of a nephew to fill the aching void 
which the death of their own children had created in their 
wounded hearts, on the other, requires no explanation. Suffice 
it to say, that, a few days later, James Cook Ayer returned to 
Lowell to stay. Thenceforth his uncle and aunt stood for father 
and mother to him, and treated him as if he were their own son. 

There remain some half-dozen pages of a dirge, or funeral 
song, written by the youthful Ayer on the occasion of the death 
of his cousin Mary, from which I quote the following lines, illus- 
trating the afifectionateness af his nature and his skill in versi- 
fication. A conversation is supposed to be going on between 
the bereaved mother on earth and the daughter in glory, in 
which the daughter is [represented as saying, among other 
things, the following : — 

"This garland, which upon my head, 

You see in beauty bloom, 
Is not the garland of the dead, 

Or woven for the tomb. 

Behold aloft my little lyre : 

'Tis ever tuned to praise : 
It glows with a poetic fire. 

And sports in heavenly lays. 

My finger strikes its warbling string, 
And notes melodious fall : 



22 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER.. 

Cherubic legions with me sing 
Praise to God of all. 

We form a choir, angellic choir, 

And float around the throne. 
Our souls are by our God inspired 

To sound their sweetest tone. 

Nor sound alone ; but melod^y. 

Framed by the hand divine. 
Rolls with reverberations down 
The ebbing 'tide of time.' " 

The memories of his cousin Mary, and of his sister Fannie^ 
he kept green through life On two occasions, some forty years 
after their little curly heads had been laid in the grave, I re- 
member hearing -him speak of them in terms of surprising- 
tenderness. One was when Charles Sumner died, when the 
newpapers recalled the name of his long-forgotten twin sister,. 
Matilda Sumner, who died about half a century earlier. The 
other was one Sunday evening, in his own library, where he 
opened Renan's Life of Jesus, and read aloud that remarkable 
dedication : — 

"To the pure spirit of my sister Henriette, who died at 
Byblus, September 24th, 1861. 

"Do you remember, from your rest in the bosom of God^ 
those long days at Ghazir, where, alone with you, I wrote these 
pages, inspired by the scenes we had just traversed.-'" 

She had been closely connected with her brother in all his 
work, copying and revising his manuscripts, and imparting to 
his style much of that matchless grace and beauty, which, in 
spite of his heresies, place Renan at the head of the religious 
writers of France. Renan himself says, with generous fondness,. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 23 

that had he died instead of his sister, she could have written 
the Life of Jesus pretty much as it has been written by him. 
^ -t^ No sooner was young Ayer established in his new home, 
than he applied himself with energy and enthusiasm to the 
object nearest to his heart — that of getting a liberal education. 

The South Grammar School House then contained two 
grammar schools, which were afterwards consolidated into what 
is now the Edson School. During something more than a 
year, he pursued the usual grammar-school studies there. The 
teacher in penmanship of that school, Ephraim B. Patch, still 
lives to attest his pupil's proficiency. 

He passed six months*' in the Lowell High School, then 
taught by Moody Currier, assisted by James S. Russell, the 
veteran who still teaches mathematics inlthat admirable school, 
and by Seth Pooler. Mr. Russell remembers him as " studious 
and in earnest, not mingling much with his school-mates." 

Prominent among his school-mates were Charles L. Aiken, 
F. F. Battles, J. P. Battles, J. C. Dalton, Jr., Charles H. Dalton, 
David Dana, Jr., Benjamin Dean, G. V. Fox, W. A. Fisher, Levi 
Hedge, Jonathan Kimball, James F. Huntington, Wm. L. North, 
J. F. Scripture, Horace B. Shattuck, Joshua Swan, Jr., Benjamin 
Walker, Thomas Wright, "and W. H. P. Wright. 

He had already, in Westford, developed a love of Latin, and 
now he took pains to master Virgil. The natural sciences also 
received his assiduous attention. 

In his scrap-book of that time I find the following effort ia 
Latin versification : — 

Mea mater, mens pater, 

In terram, qui est longe, 
Mea soror atque frater 
Me solum reliquere , 

* Mr. Russell says, "from December 1st, 1837, to June, 1838." 



1 



24 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

Vos amare et optare 

Possum, quam abestis vos ; 
Sed videre, auscultare 

Opus est ; coram essemus 
Dura Fata. Dei, mater, . 

Conjurent nos disjungere ;" 
Sed ego, amator, scio satior 
Illorum edictum rumpere. 

J. c. A. 
[TRANSLATION.] 
My mother, my father, 
On earth, who are far away ; 
My sister and brother 
Who have left me alone : 
You I love and pray for, 
Though you are absent ; 
But to see you and hear you 
Is what I desire. 
Bound as I am by a hard fate. 
The gods, O mother. 
May seek to separate us. 
But I, a lover, know well 
How to break their decree. ^ 
Of course, in a school exercise like this, the versification 
is everything, and the thought or sentiment nothing : but it is 
worthy of notice, how his domestic affection, his love of his 
own kith and kin, finds expression even in his linguistic exer- 
cise at school. 

At this period of his life, his master-motive was that of 
going to and through some first-class college. He made ap- 
peals, that were earnest and almost pathetic, to his uncle Cook, 
to Dr. Elisha Bartlett, who then graced the civic chair of his 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 25 

adopted city, and to other gentlemen in positions of influence, 
for material aid, or for help in procuring material aid, for that 
purpose. But all his efforts in this direction were fruitless. 

"Chill penury repressed his noble rage," 
though I hasten to add, it never — 

"Froze the genial current of his soul." 

Balked in his collegiate aspirations, the hopeful boy then 
turned his eyes anxiously to West Point, and to Caleb Cushing, 
who then represented the Lowell district in Congress, and who 
would gladly have nominated James C. Ayer to a cadetship in 
the Military School, (as he afterwards nominated Gustavus V. 
Fox to a cadetship in the Naval School,) had such a nomination 
then fallen within his gift. Charles Sumner had sought a 
similar nomination, and Daniel Webster and others of eminence 
had [recommended him. But another and a higher career 
awaited each of these boys, though then it was "hid from their 
eyes." It was written in the Book of Destiny that neither to 
Charles Sumner nor to James C. Ayer should a military career 
be possible. 

How the heart of the widow's son sank within him as he 
realized, at length, that for him the doors of Yale and Dart- 
mouth and the gates of West Point were closed and barred for- 
ever ! This purpose to get an education had taken such posses- 
sion of his mind, that for a time it amounted to almost a 
monomania. If he could not live an intellectual, cultured life, 
he cared not to live at all. In vain were other careers suggest- 
ed ; in vain the stars shone over him ; in vain the South wind 
blew. In vain he wandered along the banks of the Merrimack, 
and gazed upon its bowlder-strewn channel and upon the neigh- 
boring hills, 

"Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun," 
or listened t^ the plaintive music of its multitudinous waters. 



26 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

which has been heard since the morning" stars first sang together, 
and which shall be heard till the earth and the sea have passed 
away. 

"How beautiful is youth ; how bright it seems, 

With its illusions, aspirations, dreams." 
And how reluctant we are to see that the objects wiiich at one 
time seemed most to be desired, were really the last we should 
have sought tor, and that our greatest disappointments were but 
blessings in disguise. 

The last time I met Mr. Cushing at his house in Washing- 
ton, he referred to the anxious solicitations that were made to 
him in behalf of young Ayer, and his own regret at being 
unable to comply with them. "But," said he, "if I had got him 
into West Point, it would probably have been the greatest 
calamity that could have happened to him." 

One of the principal apothecary shops in the Lowell of 
that time, was that of Jacob Robbins,''-" whose acquaintance 
young Ayer had already made while riding in the stage-coach 
between Lowell and the Westford Academy. He entered this 
shop in the summer of 1838, and remained with Mr. Robbms 
as clerk and student nearly four years. 

Here he not only made himself master of the business of an 
apothecary, in all its details, but made a special study of chem- 
istry, and became an expert practical and analytical chemist. 
Under the late Dr. Samuel L. Dana, he enrered upon the 
study of Medicine, and became thoroughly proficient therein. 
Had he chosen to follow the profession of metlicine, unques- 
tionably he would have risen to eminence as a physician. His 
familiarity with that science was recognized by the medical 

^Another was that, of Carleton & Hovey, of which an account is iriven 
in Contributions of the Old Residents' Historical iVssociation, Lowell, vol. 
1, pp. 235-242, which well deserves perusal. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 27 

fraternity, and the University of -Pennsylvania gave him the 
degree of Doctor of Medicine. 

He also completed the course of studies required of those 
entering Harvard College ; and what is more extraordinary, he 
actually took up, and prosecuted for three years, the studies 
prescribed in the college curriculum. He read Latin with Rev, 
Dr. Edson, and was a member of St. Anne's Sunday School; 
but for the most part, he pursued his studies " solitary and 
alone." 

An incident, which took place about this time, shows that 
he made good use of his opportunities in chemistry. A friend 
of his, now no more, had lost several children in rapid succes- 
sion ; and, knowing no physical cause for tlieir deaths, attribut- 
ed them to " mysterious visitations of Providence." His own 
health had begun to fail when he casually mentioned his 
bereavements to Mr. Ayer. Instantly, the thought occurred to 
the young chemist, that the cause of this mortality was lead 
poison. " Let me try some of your water," he said. An 
analysis was made, which demonstrated the presence of lead. 
The well was pumped dry, the lead pipe removed, and the 
health of the family speedily restored. The ^r/^7 which followed 
this experiment was attended by envious remarks from others, 
and Dr. Dana was indignant at the presumption of his pupil. 
Thereupon Mr. Ayer separated from Dr. Dana, and for some 
time pursued his medical studies under the late Dr. Graves. 

Among those whom he occasionally met in the parlor of 
Mrs. Graves, was her celebrated niece. Miss Margaret Fuller, 
afterwards Countess Ossoli, who did not fail to impart to hini 
many of those "advanced ideas" which she unfolded in the 
Dial, in the Tribune, and in the more elaborate writings which 
bear her name. In his later years, when some striking utter- 
ance of Mrs. Howe or Mrs. Livermore was quoted to him, he 



28 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

often replied, " There is nothing new in that. I heard the same 
thing long ago trom Margaret Fuller." And she it was who, by 
the supreme charms of her mind, (for she made no pretension to 
physical beauty,) developed in young Ayer that fondness for the 
ccnpany of superior women, which characterized him through 

liJc. 

At about twenty- one years of age, he invented a rotary 
steam engine, which was put in operation in one of the Middle- 
sex Company's mills ; but this engine, like all others hitherto 
constructed on the rotary principle, was not found to be superior, 
in practice, to those whose action is reciprocating. 

By the time he attained his majority, he realized by his own 
experience that, eminently useful as colleges are, a liberal edu- 
cation may be acquired outside of them ; and I have heard him 
in later years mention Earl Russell, John Stuart Mill, and 
Henry Thomas Buckle in England, and Horace Greeley, Bayard 
Taylor, Elihu Burritt and others in this country, as examples 
of self-made men of learning deserving of the highest praise. 

In April, 1841, he purchased Mr. Robbins's apothecary 
shop for ^2,486.61. He borrowed from his uncle the money 
with which to pay for it, and repaid him in three years, though 
five years were allowed him by the terms . of the loan. Thus, 
at the age of twenty-three, he embarked on the uncertain sea of 
business in a little bark of his own, equipped wholly with bor- 
rowed capital. Of those who make such ventures, probably not 
one in a hundred escapes the gulf of insolvency or bankruptcy. 
Indeed, it is said that, of those who engage in mercantile life in 
our commercial metropolis, with capital of their own, only three 
in a hundred achieve success. 

Of the discoveries made by Mr. Ayer in the composition of 
patent medicines, it is unneces.sary for me here to speak. The 
story has been told a thousand times, and, as Daniel Webster 
said on a different occasion, " The world knows it by heart." 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 29 

Nor need I repeat here the history of the growth and de- 
velopment of the little shop of 1841 into the immense establish- 
ment of J. C. Ayer and Company. 

I prefer to expatiate on those facts in his life, and on those 
features of his character, with which the world is much less 
familiar, and to which, in fact, many of his own neighbors were 
almost strangers. 

But I cannot forbear to mention some of the evidences, 
which the establishment of J. C. Ayer and Company affords, of 
the versatile mechanical ingenuity of its founder. There is 
scarcely a machine in the entire establishment, (outside of the 
prmting department,) which was not either wholly invented by 
Mr. Ayer, or if devised originally by others, his genius has so 
reconstructed and improved it, or superadded such new devices 
to it, that it became, and remains, largely his work. 

Among the machines invented by him, are, the pill machine, 
the pill mass mixer, the bronzing machine, the dry drug mixer, 
and the drug digester ; while of those which he reconstructed, 
the Semple book-trimmer, and the paper-folding machine, de- 
serve special mention. 

He also invented a system of telegraphic printing superior 
to that of Professor Morse : but finding Mr. Bain's system quite 
as good as his own, and already in the field, Mr. Ayer made no 
effort to bring this invention into use, or to obtain letters patent 
therefor. ■•■'■" Yet when the history of the recording telegraph is 
written, the name of Mr. Ayer cannot be omitted. 

It is no injustice to Professor Morse to say, that the com- 
mon belief that he discovered the mode of connecting or pro- 
pelling currents of electro-magnetism through metallic conduct- 

*The apparatus of Mr. Ayer'.s printing telegraph was constructed by 
Clark M. Langley, and was tested by Henry W. Brickett. It was destroyed by 
the fire that invaded the establishment of J. C. Ayer and Company in 1863. 



30 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

ors, is a gross mistake. Morse's method of doing this was pa- 
tented by him in this country in 1840; but Edward Davy of 
London obtained letters patent for the same thing in England 
in 1838 ; and it had been known to many persons long before.* 
It is true, that Morse, in some of his later specifications, claimed 
letters patent on the motive power of the electric current when 
developed to produce certain specified results ; but this claim 
was not allowed. The Circuit Court held thai the motive power 
of the galvanic current, however developed to produce a given 
residt, can no more be patented than the motive power of steam 
to propel boats, however applied. f 

Mr. Morse was allowed his claim to priority of invention 
with respect to his recording telegraph, or system of telegraphic 
stenography, and nothing more ;^ and while I would pluck no 
feather from Morse's plume, I claim for Mr. Ayer the invention 
of a system of telegraphic notation as good as that from which 
Mr. Morse derived his claim to honor and renown. 

In 1845, his uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Cook, removed 
to Burlington, Vermont, where they resided for five years. Dur- 
ing that period, he wrote to them constantly and fully, his letters 
averaging more than one a week. Mrs. Cook, who was his aunt 
by blood as well as by marriage, has preserved these letters — 
three hundred in number — and nowhere is so much of the 
social life of Lowell so fully and so vivaciously recorded as in — 

*Se(' tlie opinion of the Circnit Court (Judj^es Woodbuiy and Spragiie) 
in Smith v. Downinii:, 1 Fisher, pp. 74-77. 

fSmith V. Ely, o McLean, 7G. 

JThe wires and the circuit, ■ the galvanic battery,— the use of posts, and 
the ground for a part of the circuit,— the breal<s in it by various devices, as 
by lifting tiie wire out, or a blow, — the making of signals and marks*, —the 
})aper and the clock-work,— and the needle deflected, if not the lever,— were 
all known before Morse's time. Smith v. Downing, ubi supra. See also 
Olieilly V. Morse, 15 Howard's U. S. Supreme Court Reports, pp. 62-137. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 31 

"Those fallen leaves that keep their green, 
The noble letters of the dead." 
His joys, his soirovvs, his hopes, his fears, his outer environ- 
ments and his interior life, — in a word, the whole man, "sub- 
jective and objective," as the Germans say, — are all clearly 
mirrored there. 

Written for no other eyes than those of uncle and aunt, 
these letters contain many personal allusions that I dare not 
quote. Nothing is written in spite, "nor aught set down in mal- 
ice ;" but many a man is touched off in a graphic and lively 
manner, but often not at all flatteringly to his own vanity and 
self-esteem. 

Here is one of his letters : 

Lowell, 23kd October, 1846. 
JNEy Dear Aunt: Allow me to present to your acceptance the 
accompan^'ing vase. 

It is of Italian workmanship, having been carved from native Ala- 
baster by the ariists of Milan, under whose cbissel, our favorite poet, 
Emerson, lias well said: "the mountain of granite blooms into an 
eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finisli, as well as serial 
proportions and perspective, of vegetable beautj'." 

Would it were worthier; but such as it is, I deem its delicacy, and 
hlancJte purity, not unfit emblems of 3'our own tenderness and aft'ection. 
!May it witness the days and months and years roll over you, laden with 
jo3's without a sorrow. 

It' this silent memento can .'^peak to j'our memory a kind word for 
me, it will give me pleasure to hope I am not entirely forgotten. 
Believe me, with tender regard, 

Yours ever fondl)', 

JAMES C. AYER. 
Miis. J. Cook, Burlington, Vt. 

In a postscript to this letter he sends his aunt the following 
Greek "sentiment" : — 



32 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

T(X)i> y.alwv ds rd ^ezonoipov xaXov eaziv. 

" Among beautiful things nothing is more beautiful than 
the Autumn of life." The appropriateness of this motto is ob- 
vious. Mr. and Mrs. Cook were then entering this " golden 
season," this Indian Summer of their lives. 

Here is another of his letters. The latter part of it now 
sounds almost pathetic, since he who wrote it has passed away. 

Lowell, Mass., 8th August. 1848. 
My Dear Aunt : 

I take the liberty to send you with this a copy of features which 
you may recognize and which I have ventured to hope would be welome 
to the fireside, where I have so often and so long been welcome. It 

was executed by , whom you know to be among the first of 

American Artists, and this is thought to do credit even to him. But 
you would not need to be told this to see that it is an inspiration of 
the pencil — a gem of art. 

If you can afford it a corner, perhaps it may win for me some kindly 
recollection, the more faulty original could never deserve ; and should 
its tints still linger when mine have paled away, may they call back 
to you and yours, amid happy friends and pleasant hours, friends and 
hours that have been happy. 

Believe me, Dear Madam, 

Yours ever truly, 

JAMES C. AYER. 
Mrs. LovrsA Cook, Burlington, Vt. 

Few subjects escaped his attention. He was among the 
first to investigate scientifically the causes of the potato rot ; 
and he struck at the root of the subject by propounding three 
questions : — 

Whether the reproduction of the potato and the grape from 
their seed would evade the decay that has overtaken them : — 
whether their healthy progeny would not be attacked by the 
disease which their old age had engendered : — whether it 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 33 

would not, like the cholera, sprung from the noisome dens of 
eastern cities, transplant itself into the robust sons of the forest 
to blast and destroy them. 

On a fly-leaf in his copy of Carpenter's Chemistry, he jot- 
ted the following : — 

"The diseases which have attacked the potato and the vine — 
two of the staple commodoties of food for man — have justly 
alarmed the whole civilized world. Sages and practical men 
have investigated their causes, and sought for remedies — thus 
far in vain. Unless some remedy is found, there is reason to 
believe — ^judging by the past — these diseases will grow worse 
yearly, until they end in the extinction of these almost indis- 
pensable articles of human comfort. But are we not looking 
above and below the source of all this difficulty .'' 

"Among all the laborious researches that have been made 
to find the cause of these alarming diseases, have we not over- 
looked one important and well known fact ? It is an establish- 
ed law of nature, that individual life shall soon decay, and that 
organic life can be preserved through long series of years only 
by its reproduction through the generative process. All living 
things produce seed and die. The seed will reproduce the 
vitality that animated them. This is the generative process, 
and is indispensable to the continuation of the species of every 
living thing. Although the particles, which constitute the in- 
dividual, may be, and often are, many times renewed ; still its 
organism must wear out and decay ; its vitality can by no pos- 
sibility be perpetuated, except through the generative process. 
This is the invariable law which governs all organic life. There 
may be seeming exceptions to it, but they are really not excep- 
tions. By grafting and by layers, the life of the individual may 
be prolonged, without the generative process, through many 
years, but not perpetually. For it is found, by experience 



34 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

that fruits propagated by grafting, finally fail. The vitality of 
the tree must be renewed through the generative process of 
seed after a time. Plants propagated from cuttings may be 
successfully grown through many generations ; but this, too, is 
a prolongation of the life of the original individual, and cannot 
be perpetual. The stock finally fails ; but the seed of it will 
give plants in no wise impaired. 

"It is obvious that grafting, innoculation, cuttings, layers, 
are propagations without the generative process ; or, in other 
words, are prolongations of the life they bear — but not its re- 
newal. Consequently, by the primary law of organic existence, 
such extended vitality must have a limited duration. Every 
horticulturist knows that varieties of fruit propagated by 
grafting or budding, are not perpetual, but finally fail. 

"The vines of the old countries have been propagated for 
centuries by means other than the seed. The potato has been 
propagated for years almost entirely by layers, for the potato 
bulb is merely an expansion of the stem. Now, is it not per- 
fectly obvious that both these must fail ? And is not the cause 
as plain as the result is painful ?" 

It is creditable to this young chemist, that these conjectures, 
formed, as it were, by a flash from the light of his own genius, 
have been confirmed in part by the laborious investigations and 
experiments of scientific agriculturists in later years.* 

I do not refer to these conjectures merely because of the 
importance of the result to which they contributed, but because, 
in many investigations, the chase is worth more than the game, 
and the process more than the result. As Mr. Rosworth Smith 
observes, "A brilliant hypothesis formed not by random guess- 
work, but by the trained imagination of the man of science, or 

*See many papers on the potato and its diseases, in tlie Reports of the 
Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, ttc. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 35 

by the true divination of genius, enlarges the horizon of the 
student." Such certainly was the effect of these speculations 
on Mr. Ayer. 

As the years rolled by, a copious stream of wealth poured 
in upon him, far exceeding his most sanguine expectations, and 
swelling in volume every year. 

On the fourteenth of November, 1850, he was married by 
the Rev. S. W. Hanks to Josephine M. Southwick, daughter of 
the late Royal Southwick. He afterwards purchased the his- 
toric "Stone Tavern," •••■" on the right bank of Merrimack River, 
within sound of the everlasting monody ot Pawtucket Falls. 
Here he enshrined his household gods, and delighted to dis- 
pense a baronial hospitality. 

His domestic affections were strong; and nothing was ever 
spared, that could enhance the happiness of his wife or of his 
children. Nearly a quarter of a century after his marriage, in 
a letter of condolence to a friend whose wife had died, Mr. 
Ayer indicates his own keen appreciation of the joys of wedded 
life, in a manner which is all the more significant because it is 
indirect and seemingly unconscious. He says, — "No man can 
fully appreciate, for another, the loss of that great, best gift of 
God to man — a good wife. Most men, like ourselves, think 
their wives the best women in the world, and that the world is a 
blank wilderness without them. But a kind Providence softens 
this conviction, and gives strength to endure what cannot be 

avoided. Ihoped for your sake that Mrs. would escape 

from any further visitation of her terrible disease ; but time has 
shown that she did not, although it could only hasten her along 



*This edifice was erected in 1825 by Captain Phineas Whitinir, wiio sold 
it to General Shcpard Leach. It was afterwards owned by the Proprietors 
of the Locks and Canals, and, later still, by Colonel Jetterson Bancroft, who 
sold it to Mr. Ayer. 



36 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

in the path where we are all going. Mrs. Ayer feels in strong 
sympathy with your affliction, and talks with me about it in a 
way that shows a melancholy interest in its cause. Her wish 
and mine is that He who tempers the storm to the shorn lamb, 
may have you in His keeping." 

In the early years of Lowell, "Coburn's Tavern," as Mr. 
Ayer's house was then called, was much resorted to in Summer 
by families from Boston. Here, on the days of their annual 
meetings, the great "captains of industry" ate dinners fit for 
kings, often having as their special guest some prominent law- 
yer or statesman of that time. Here came Daniel Webster, 
when the laurels of his Plymouth Rock oration were still green 
upon his brow; and men are still living, who heard with rapture 
the thunder of the E.xpounder of the Constitution rolling heavily 
within those walls on the favorite theme of his post-prandial 
eloquence — the Progress of New England. 

What a pity that none of those speeches are preserved ! 
"The godlike Webster," visiting the lower banks of his own 
native river, in the prime of his intellectual powers, (I take it 
for granted,) saw " tongues in trees, books in the running 
brooks," and heard eloquent voices in the roaring water-falls, in 
the rolling river, and in the forest-clad hills. 

CORPORATION REFORMS. 

Perhaps it was tJie Genius of the Stone Ho7i.se, so often 
visited by the founders of the manufacturing system of Lowell, 
which suggested to Mr. Ayer the reforms which he afterwards 
advocated, in that system. 

As a capitalist, Mr. Ayer naturally invested largely in the 
manufacturing corporations of Lowell, as also in those of Man- 
chester and Lawrence. In several of them he became the 
largest stockholder. For some years he gave no personal at- 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 37 

tention to the management of these corporations, but like too 
many others, left his interests to be preserved or sacrificed by 
the official managers. If his own strong sense started doubts 
as to the capability of these managers, — 

"He fought his doubts with all his might," — 
assuring himself that all the treasurers, directors and agents 
were faithful, capable and honorable men. 

But the paralysis which struck several of these corporations 
in 1857, — the collapse of the Middlesex Company in Lowell, 
and of the Bay State Mills in Lawrence, — roused alike the indig- 
nation and the energies of Mr. Aycr, and nerved him to a 
campaign — or rather a series of campaigns — whereby several 
manufacturing corporations, which had drifted to the verge of 
bankruptcy, were saved from the gulf which yawned for them, 
and started on a new career of honor and prosperity. 

The opinion had long been gaining ground among enlight- 
ened practical manufacturers, that corporate enterprise could 
never compete successfully with private enterprise ; that it could 
never command that unity and continuity of purpose, and that 
vigor and rapidity of movement, so indispensable to success; 
that by inducing alternate periods of over-production and reac- 
tion, it would render any steady growth impossible ; that by 
making every man holding stock in rival companies a competi- 
tor with himself, it forced stockholders into relations, false, un- 
natural and antagonistic, to their business ; and that several of 
the corporations located in Lowell would be eventually ruined 
through the incapacity of their managers. 

John Stuart Mill says, — "The administration of a joint 
stock association is in the main, adinijtistration by Jiircd ser- 
vants ; the business being the principal concern of no one ex- 
cept those who are hired to carry it on. But experience shows 



38 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

how inferior is the quality of hired service, compared with the 
ministration of those personally interested in the work."* 

And long before Mill's time, Adam Smith enunciated the 
doctrine "that joint stock companies could never be expected to 
maintain themselves, except in branches of business, which like 
bankin;^, insurance, and some others, admit of being, in a con- 
siderable degree, reduced to fixed rules." 

Although Mr. Ayer shared these opinions, he was not pre- 
pared lor the astounding developments that were made in con- 
nection with the failure of the Middlesex and l^ay State com- 
panies, in which more than two millions of dollars were sunk 
forever. " By the wanton extravagance of the men who had 
monopolized their capital, dependent families, widows, and old 
men incapable of labor," were, as he afterwards wrote, "stripped 
of the reliance of their old age."t 

Mr. Aycr's general views on our manufacturing corpora- 
tions, are thus outlined in an able pamphlet : — 

"These institutions," he says, "were originally organized 
by a few men, who united their capital like co-partners, and 
obtained such charters as they desired from the state govern- 
ment. Under charters thus granted, — which were well suited 
to their early condition, — our manufacturing companies, so long 
as that condition continued, were well managed and very 
prosperous. The small number of owners, by devoting their 
personal attention, and by bringing all their shrewdness, energy 
and perseverance to bear for the welfare of their enterprises, as 
other partners do in the management of their property, were so 
far successful as to afford a generous employment to industry 
and a profitable investment to capital. 

*See Mill's Principles of Political Economy, 5th edition, vol. 1, pp. 
183-187; vol. 2, p. 582. 

tSee his pamphlet entitled "Some of the Usages and Abuses in the Man- 
agement of our Manufacturing Corporations." 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 39 

"But a generation has passed away. Time has changed the 
relations of owners and managers, until only traces of their 
original condition remain. The originators — large stock-hold- 
ers, or principal owners, as they were called — of these institu- 
tions have died ( three or four only of them are now left, and 
they feeble old men ;) their estates have been distributed to 
their heirs, and sold^ out to the public. They subscribed for 
and held their stocks in lots ranging from $25,000 to $100,000 
in a corporation. Now, the average ownership is about three 
^i,ODD shares to one individual. The present stockholders, 
instead of having, as the original owners did, a personal and 
intimate acquaintance, rarely know each other at all. They 
are scattered all over New England, and even other States. 
They have bought their shares as an investment, and with the 
delusive hope that somebody is interested in it who can and will 
take care of it. 

"As the charters were granted, and as the laws of the state 
now stand ( charters and laws, be it remembered, made express- 
ly for the condition of things already described, when it was 
wisely intended to elect the large owners as officers and man- 
agers, ) it is possible, and is the practice, for the officers in 
possession to re-elect themselves perpetually into the places 
they hold, in defiance of the stockholders, or any combination 
of them that can be made." 

How this was accomplished, and by what appliances, Mr. 
Ayer explains as follows : — 

"The law leaves it with the officers to call the annual meet- 
ing of stockholders for their election where and when they 
please. They call these meetings at the office of the Treasurer 
in Boston. This is generally a room which can hold from forty 
to eighty people, while each corporation has from three hundred 
and fiftv to si.x hundred individual stockholders. The Treasurer 



40 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

and Directors can, and often do, more than half fill it with their 
immediate partizans, friends and retainers, provided with proxy- 
votes. Some stockholders succeed in getting in, but many more 
come too late, find the room filled, and leave. This secures a 
hand vote for the officers. Now as to the method of securing 
the stock vote: It has long been the practice for the officers to 
have the clerk at the desk ask the stockholders, as they come 
into the Treasurer's office for their dividends, to sign one book 
or paper, which is a receipt, and another, which is a proxy. 
Sometimes this demand is explained as a necessity to get a 
quorum, and sometimes no explanation is given, because the 
stockholder ( perhaps a woman ) supposes both signatures re- 
quired for a receipt. By this process a majority of the proxies 
of any corporation is easily taken, and kept in possession of 
the officers to be used by them, or their partizans, at the annual 
meeting, for their own purposes ; which, of course, gives them 
entire control of the franchise of the corporation. Under these 
circumstances, it is imposible for the owners to prevent their 
officers from re-electing themselves again and again, no matter 
how outrageous their abuse of the properties they govern. It 
must be remembered that not one quarter of the stockholders 
are present, or could gain admission to the room if they came ; 
and that the officers have virtual possession and control of the 
meetin'j;, with appliances always at hand to talk down, choke 
down, crowd out anything or anybody not in complicity with 
themselves.""'-'" 

*" As au association of many partners must practically be under the 
management of a few, every facility ought to be afforded to the body for ex- 
ereisino- the necessary control and cheek over those few, whether they be 
themselves members of the association, or merely its hired servants." Mill's 
Principles of Political Economy, vol. 2, p. 512. But the coteries against 
which Mr. Ayer contended, and some of which he finally suppressed, looked 
down upon philosophers and "literary fellahs" with contempt. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 41 

At some of these meetings, scenes took place that might 
vie in interest, on a small scale, with that which took place in 
the British House of Commons on the memorable night whtn 
Disraeli, now Earl of 'Beaconsfield, made his maiden speech, — 
when suddenly, "at the instigation of that old mocker, the 
devil," the Commons of Great Britain, especially those who loved 
mischief, and those who loved fun, assailed the nascent Primier 
with ten thousand voices at once : — bleated like calves, bellowed 
like bulls, baahed like sheep, squealed like pigs, barked like 
dogs, crowed like cocks, and brayed like asses ; — so that it was 
impossible for the speaker to proceed. 

But though these voices of the barnyard, thus raised in 
combination, might silence Mr. Disraeli for the time, they could 
not put him down. Still less could similar demonstrations de- 
feat or even much delay the work of reconstruction and reform 
in our Lowell corporations. 

The signal of the coming battle was sounded in July, 1858, 
in a letter signed " Historicus," written by me, but inspired by 
Mr. Ayer, and printed in the newspapers most widely circulated 
in manufacturing circles. It was addressed to E. B. Bigelow 
on the occasion of the publication by him of a pamphlet* 
containing some very just but very mild strictures on the man- 
agement of the manufacturing corporations of New England. 
Mr. Bigelow agreed with Mr. Ayer in his main object — the re- 
formation of the mode in which these institutions were conduct- 
ed ; but he lacked the courage and audacity of Mr. Ayer, and 
hesitated to adopt "the policy of thorough," (to use the Earl of 
Strafford's famous phrase) which Mr. Ayer adopted at the start, 
and adhered to inflexibly to the end. He was not prepared to 
say, with "His£oricus," — 

*Remarks 011 the Depressed Condition of Manufactures in Massachu- 
setts, with Suggestions as to Its Cause and Its Reniedy. 



42 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

"Let energy, prudence and economy be recognized among 
the virtues of corporation government. Let no man fatten on 
corporation pay without a full equivalent in labor, either of body 
or brain. Put none in charge of the work except practical 
manufacturers, versed in every process from the wheel-pit to 
the belfry. Banish those decayed families and coteries that 
have sat down in corporation offices as upon life estates. 

"Banish the danism and the nepotism which fill important 
posts with brainless cousins and nephews, and allow no field for 
plebeian energy and skill. Disband that oligarchy of office-hold- 
ers which now rules supreme ; which makes one man Director of 
thirty companies and President of nineteen. Protect by legis- 
lation the smaller stockholders ; save the middling interest from 
the tyranny of aristocrats. Restrict the practice of proxy voting. 
Let there be no repetition of such outrages as were witnessed 
at the last stockholders' meeting of the Hamilton Company, 
where the selling agent carried in his pocket the proxies of four 
hundred shares, to vote down anything that he pleased, and 
where the reasonable request of the Lowell stockholders, that 
one Director might be chosen from this city, was defeated by a 
combination of salaried corporation office-holders, none voting 
in the negative but those drawing high pay." 

The first thing to be done was to secure by legislation, to 
all stockholders, free access to the lists bearing their own 
names. Since this privilege has been won and enjoyed for 
twenty years, it seems incredible that anybody ever doubted or 
denied it. But it cost Mr. Ayer many eftbrts to secure this 
privilege ; and by his own first exercise of it, he came near 
being involved in a mortal affray. He was quietly examining 
the books of the Middlesex Company, when Richard S. Fay, 
the Treasurer, suddenly approached, and dealt him a blow. 
Instantly Mr. Ayer, happening to have a stout-bladed pen-knife 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 43 

open in his hand, responded to Fay by a thrust with his knife 
in the abdomen. The blow of Mr. Fay and the thrust of Mr. 
Aver were both "spasmodic," and were instantly regretted on 
both sides. All hostile feeling on either side was succeeded, at 
once, by anxiety to learn the depth to which Mr. Fay had been 
"harpooned." Mr. Fay opened his clothes, and Mr. Ayer, 
assuming for the time the role of a surgeon, proceeded carefully 
to probe the wound which he had himself inflicted. The result 
of the diagnocis was that the intestines had not been punctured, 
(though the knife had entered within a hair's-breadth of the in- 
terior,) and that the life of the patient was not in peril. 

As a result of this affray, Mr. Cook, the uncle of Mr. Ayei ; 
who had been recalled to the management of the Middlesex 
Mills after the collapse of 1857, was promptly dismissed by Mr. 
Fay. For fifteen years Mr. Cook had managed those mills so 
well that the dividends paid to the stockholders had averaged 
seventeen per cent, per annum. Nevertheless, at a wave of the 
Treasurer's magic wand, Mr. Cook was dismissed on the pre- 
tence that he was incompetent for his place. 

Called before the Legislative Committee on Manulactures, 
February 24th, 1859, Mr. Ayer stated that the books of the 
Middlesex Company had been falsified at one time to the extent 
of $103,000. Lawrence, Stone and Company had sunk $300,- 
000 for this corporation. He said it had been calculated by 
persons having a turn for the higher mathematics, that this firm 
and its several members had cost the community, in salaries, 
commissions, etc., a thousand dollars a day during the ten last 
years of its existence. 

What galled him more was the consciousness that "Men in 
Lowell, Lawrence, and elsewhere, who had invested the earn- 
ings of their whole lives in these institutions, could not prevent 
the dissipation of their means, even had they fully known the 



44 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

extent of the abuses which were in operation. The fact that 
they (the managers) could expend $89,000 of the company's 
money in a manner and for a purpose never explained, except 
by the unrefuted charge that it was used to bribe Congress* 
without any consent or even knowledge of the stockholders, of 
itself, shows the impunity with which they could squander and 
the baseness of the purpose to which they could appropriate the 
capital in their charge. 

"Samuel Lawrence, of Lawrence, Stone and Co., the selling 
agents, was the Treasurer of both Corporations. His bond of 
$25,000 to each Company, forfeited by default, although signed 
by Abbott Lawrence, was never paid.-'-' The corporations, after 
their failure, being continued in the control of his friends, it was 
never enforced. Thus, the constant pretence that the com- 
pany's interests were safe because secured by a wealthy man, 
ended in pretence only. It is supposed by inexperienced stock- 
holders, that the wealth and great pretensions to character and 
standing in the community of their officers, give them ground 
of security for the fair, honorable, and judicious management 
of the interests entrusted "to them. But this is a delusion. "f 

Glaring as were the frauds practiced upon the Middlesex 
and Bay State Mills, none of the perpetrators of those frauds 
ever received the smallest punishment. The immunity which 
they enjoyed manifestly tended to encourage others in similar 
crimes. Mr. Ayer often predicted that other Treasurers, seeing 
how easily Samuel Lawrence escaped, would ruin their corpora- 
tions as fatally as Lawrence ruined the Middlesex and Bay State 
Mills. Since Mr. Ayer rested from his labors, his prediction has 

*But see Middlesex Manufacturiag Company v. Lawrence, 1 Allen, 339. 

tSee Ayer's Usages and Abuses, &c., pp. 11, 12. See also Report of the 
Investigating Committee to the Stockholders of the Middlesex Company. 
The associates of Mr. Ayer ou this Committee, in 1857, were B. F. Butler, 
G. W. Lyman, William Sohier and R. S. Fay. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 45 

been strikingly verified in the frauds and defalcations of S. A^ 
Chase, Charles P. Stickney, and George T. Hathaway, of Fall 
River, and of John G. Tappan. of Boston, all of whom are now 
expiating their offences in the State Prison at Concord. 

Other defaulting Treasurers will rise, flourish, and fail ; will 
fall into crime, and will suffer for their crimes, as Chase, Stick- 
ney, and Hathaway are now suffering. The system fosters 
frauds. There is both wisdom and charity in the remarks with 
which Mr. Ayer closes his pamphlet : — 

"We do not assert that the individuals who compose these 
official cliques, and have fattened themselves with such insatia- 
ble voracity upon these institutions, were originally worse than 
other men. But we do maintain that the system is thoroughly 
bad, and that it has demoralized its administrators until they 
can and do unblushingly perpetrate acts which would anywhere 
else banish them from the fellowship of honorable men. Some 
such acts have been, and great numbers more could be given, 
yet not one of them has met any rebuke or the slightest con- 
demnation from the associates of the party or parties engaged 
in them. On the contrary, their exposure is uniformly sup- 
pressed with the least possible publicity. An obvious reason 
for this would seem to be that they are all so involved in simi- 
lar practices, or benefited by the proceeds of them, that they 
can neither oppose nor expose one of their number, even if his 
course should transcend the line of what they deem prudence. 

"Thus have outrages upon every principle of right and 
decency not only gone unrebuked, but they have had the 
active co-operation of men of very pretentious claims to 
position and character. So vicious has this system become in 
its influences, that it might almost seem to make swindlers of 
virtuous men, and it should be changed, not alone for the pres- 
ervation of the great properties it concerns, but also to save 



46 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

from contamination those who must administer it. The blight- 
ing effect is felt by all the capital and labor engaged under it. 
The proceeds of them both are largely diverted from the chan- 
nels where they belong, to be consumed in sumptuous living by 
idle men." 

In 1859, the affairs of the Lowell ( Carpet) Manufacturing 
Company were examined by a Committee of which Mr. Ayer 
was Chairman — Peter Lawson and Horace J. Adams being his 
associates. ■■•'■■ Their report shows that, for some years, A. and A. 
Lawrence and Company had received more than fifty thousand 
dollars a year from the profits of that corporation. Being at 
the same time the selling agents of seven or more other corpo- 
rations, this firm enriched its members with but a small invest- 
ment of capital and labor, and with no risk from guaranty, 
or insurance, or any other cause. The report presented a clear 
and masterly scrutiny of the management of this corporation, 
and recommended that its fabrics be no longer sold through 
commission houses, but by the Treasurer. The result of this 
investigation was a great reduction in the amount of the com- 
misions of the selling agents. 

Twenty years have since rolled by. The stockholders, 
groaning for dividends, clamored for another overhauling in the 
management of their affairs, and sighed for such leadershi]) as 
they had in i859.f "O for an hour of Dundee!" But they 
sighed in vain. 

The mismanagement of the Lawrence Machine Shop was so 
gross that the entire capital of that corporation, amounting to a 
million dollars, was sunk ; and still the company was in debt to 
the extent of $120,000. 

♦See Report of a Committee of the Stocklioldcr.s of the Lowell Manufac- 
turing Company. It was printed in 1859. 

fSee Dr. Oilman Kimball, in the Lowell Daily Courier, February 1, 1879. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 47 

Another shameful fact exposed in his pamphlet, was, that 
while the Boott, Massachusetts and Merrimack corporations 
were reducing the wages of their operatives to the starvation 
point, and paying but small and irregular dividends to their 
stockholders, they were nevertheless paying an agent $36,000 
per annum for buying their cotton. 

In the Hamilton Company, it appeared that the Treasurer''-" 
had sent his own son to the South to buy cotton ; that advan- 
tage had there been taken of this callow youth ; that bales partly 
filled with sand, gravel and stones, Csome of the stones weighing 
fifty pounds apiece,) had been palmed off upon him for prime 
cotton ; and that the company had actually sunk fifty thousand 
dollars by this boy's experiments. Horace J. Adams, who effi- 
ciently aided Mr. Ayer in exposing the mismanagement of this 
company's affairs, forced the Treasurer, f by a series of direct 
questions, to admit that he had made an overvaluation of $150,- 
000 in cotton, coal and dyestuffs — for the obvious purpose of 
blinding the eyes of the stockholders to the true condition of 
their affairs J. W. Paige and Company, who had received 
about $22,000 a year in commissions as selling agents, and had 
also sat in the board of directors, were now excluded from that 
board — a separation between the functions of the master and 
those of the servant which other companies have not always 
made. 4! 

In the investigation of the management of the Merrimack 
Manufacturing Company, it appeared that J. W. Paige and Com- 
pany were paid $36,000 a year for commissions as selling agents 



*The late Thomas G. Car}^, who held this office for twenty yeai-s, from 
1839 to 1859. 

fThe late Arthur L. Devens, who ran several other corporations ashore. 

JThe report of the committee which investigated this company, was not 
printed. But see Ayer's Usages anO Aljuses, &c.. pp. .5, G: and Cowley's His- 
tory of Lowell, p. 51. 



48 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER- 

and $16,000 a year more for allowances and incidental expenses. 
Yet Mr. Paige owned only five shares of this company's stock.* 
James M. Beebe and Company had bought half a million 
dollars' worth of Merrimack prints — all that the company then 
had — for nine cents a yard. And immediatly afterwards it was 
voted to sell no more prints for less than thirteen cents a yard. 
Most of the prints thus bought yielded to Beebe and Company 
fifty cents a yard. 

In order to show to the stockholders how small a portion of 
his time the Treasurer of the Merrimack devoted to their ser- 
vice, and how small a return he rendered for his large salary, 
Mr. Ayer inquired of him, at one of the annual meetings, how 
many other offices he then held, for which he received salaries. 
The embarrassed creature replied, in confusion of mind though 
in a placid manner : — " How many clerks do you employ .''" This 
question was manifestly ijiappropriate, and only meant to evade 
the point. Mr. Ayer promptly rejoined, " I am not your servant ; 
but you are mine ; and I have a right to know how much of your 
time you devote to my service." A deliberate lie was now the 
only way to escape, and the Treasurer, thus pushed to the wall, 
declared that he held no other salaried office. This was a gross 
falsehood ; it was known to his associates, who were present at 
the time, to be a falsehood, and was promptly publicly exposed 
by Mr. Ayer ; but so low was the standard of honor and moral- 
ity among this coterie, the exposure had no perceptible efi'ect on 
the inculpated official. 

The Manchester Print Works were generally supposed to be 

prosperous. The Treasurer and his son drew about forty thou- 

*Ayer's Usages and Abuses, &c., pp. 12-15; aucl the reports of several 
committees, printed by this corporation in 1861, 1863, etc. The Treasurer 
whom Mr. Ayer here " cuts up " was the late F. B. Crowninshield, once the 
h\w partner of Kufus Choate. For further information on these matters, see 
Cowley's History of Lowell, pp. 42-69. Among Mr. Ayer's coadjutors in the 
Merrimack campaign was Joshua W. Daniels. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 49 

sand dollars a year in salaries, in bounties on patents, etc. On 
visiting this establishment, Mr. Ayer found the apartments of 
the manager fitted up in regal style. He gave his name, but 
that was not enough. The etiquette of the establishment re- 
quired that all visitors should send in their cards. On comply- 
ing with this rule, he was graciously received ; but his instincts, 
as he said, told him that " something was rotten in* Denmark." 
An investigation revealed the fact, that the company was well 
nigh insolvent. The Treasurer was dismissed, and the prop- 
erty sold. A new company was formed ; a competent Treas- 
urer and a competent Superintendent were secured ;"'•'■" and this 
establishment is now in good condition. Horace J. Adams, the 
coadjutor of Mr. Ayer in the reconstruction of the Tremont and 
Suffolk, and in the investigation of the Hamilton corporaiion, 
cooperated efficiently in the campaign of the Manchester Print 
Works, as also did Judge Clark. 

But the most splendid monument of Mr. Ayer's talents in 
connection with our manufactures are the Tremont and Suffolk 
Mills. These works were formerly owned by two corporaiions, 
with the same Treasurer. During the Civil War, they both sold 
their cotton, instead of manufacturing it, and became hopelessly 
embarrassed with debt. Under Mr. Ayer's direction, the two 
corporations were re-organized as one, whereby their expenses 
were reduced by about $30,000 a year. 

Mr. Ayer obtained a large amount of the stock, selected an 
excellent agent, f and "took hold" of these mills with his own 
hands. He induced Horace G. Adams and other stockholders 
to join him, and labored night and day for months, until he suc- 

*The new Treasurer was General John C. Palfrey : the new Superintend- 
ent was the late James Dean ; to whom, on his death, in 1876, his son, Ben- 
jamin C. Dean, succeeded. 

tThomas S. Shaw, who is still agent. 



50 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

ceeded in getting the old buildings enlarged, new machinery in- 
troduced throughout, and upwards of fourteen hundred hands 
furnished with employment. He assumed the Treasurership 
himself, and for a time discharged all the duties of that position. 
He then secured the services of John C. Birdseye, under whose 
excellent management the Tremont and Suffolk Mills still con- 
tinue, with scarcely a superior in New England. 

The par value of the stock of this corporation was $i,ooo a 
share. J. C. Ayer and Company bought very heavily of this 
stock at from ^350 to $500 per share, when he took these mills 
in hand. When he resigned the Treasurership, the stock stood 
thirty-five per cent above par. 

Among the acts passed by the General Court of Massachu- 
setts in consequence of the agitation started and largely sus- 
tained by Mr. Ayer, were the following : — 

1. An act requiring corporation officers to keep lists of the 
stockholders, and also the books of the corporation, open at all 
times to the inspection of stockholders. ••'•■ 

2. An act concerning proxy voting by officers of corpora- 
tions,f providing that " No officer of any corporation shall as 
proxy or attorney, cast more votes than represent twenty shares 
of the capital stock, unless all the shares so represented by him 
are owned by one person. No salaried officer of any corpora- 
tion shall vote as proxy or attorney. No officer of any corpora- 
tion shall ask ior, receive, procure to be obtained or use any 
proxy vote in the corporation," etc. 

3. The general corporation law,| which provides that any 
three or more persons may associate themselves without the in- 

*Acts of 1858, chapter 144; re-enacted in General Statutes, chapter 68, 
section 10. 

fActs of 1865, chapter 236. General Statutes, chapters 60, 61, 68. 
JActs of 1870, chapter 224, and the amendments thereto. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 51 

tervention of the legislature, and form corporations with a capital 
of not less than $5,000 or more than $500,000, for any manu- 
facturing business or other ])urposes named therein. This was 
a very great advance on all previous legislation on that subject 
in the state; and like some of the other acts here specified, was 
the work, in part, of other influences. 

4. An act requiring corporations to make returns to the 
assessors of cities and towns,* giving a complete list of their 
shareholders, with their place of residence, the number of shares 
belonging to each on the first day of May, and the par and cash 
market value of such shares; also the whole amount of capital 
stock of the corporation, and the amount, at the value at which 
it was last assessed, of its real estate subject to assessment on 
the first day of May, and of machinery as last assessed in the 
city or town where its place of business was situated. All such 
shares were taxed to the stockholders at their value, after de- 
ducting the value of the real estate and machinery, which was 
still taxed where it was situated. 

5. Prior to 1863, the shares of stockholders in other states 
escaped taxation here ; and in many cases Massachusetts stock- 
holders "dodged" their taxes by transferring their shares to a 
friend in New Hampshire, etc. To meet this class of "tax- 
dodgers" the Legislature enacted as follows : — 

"Every corporation organized under a charter or under 
general statutes, paying dividends in scrip, stock or money, 
shall reserve from each and every dividend one fifteenth of that 
portion due and payable to its stockholders residing out of the 
Commonwealth, and shall pay the same, as a tax or excise, on 
such estate or commodity, to the treasurer of the Common- 
wealth, within ten days after such dividend is declared payable: 
provided, that this act shall not apply to stock standing in the 

*Acts of 1863, chapter 247. 



52 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

name of executors, administrators or trustees, when the income 
is payable to persons residing in this state so that the stock is 
liable to taxation under existing laws. ""•••■ 

6. The act of 1865, revising previous laws touching the 
taxation of corporations, and providing for the collection of 
their taxes by the state. 

It is to be remembered that each of these measures en- 
countered a powerful opposition, ably led by such men as the 
late Nathan Appleton, who loudly protested that the Legisla- 
ture was discriminating against corporations. But the long 
maintenance of these acts shows that they were good, and that 
the cry of "meddlesome legislation" was unfounded. f 

The men whom he encountered, in spite of a fair exterior,^ 
were of a nature essentially and irredeemably base and vulgar — 
sordid selfishness and shallow superciliousness being their lead- 
ing characteristics. Though observing all the amenities of good 
society, and many of them conspicuous therein, they were, in 
their dealings with their stockholders, hard, mean, brutal, cor- 
rupt, tyrannical and tricky. What but the constant habit of 
"viewing in reverse" the relations which they bore to the stock- 
holders, of whom they were really the servants, — however they 
might affect the air of masters, — could have led gentlemen like 
Nathan Appleton, John A. Lowell and Edward Austin, to rec- 
commend, as they did, to the Directors of the Merrimack Com- 
pany, that they " continue to exercise their discretion in the 
management of their affairs, without reference to the cavils of 
others r — meaning without reference to the criticisms of a com- 
mittee of their own stockholders. 

*Acts of 1863, chapter 236. 

t"I cannot, until some broad principle is made more obvious than it ever 
has yet been, do such violence to all common notions on the subject, as to- 
attach on equal inviolability to private and corporate property." Hallam's- 
Constitutional Ilistoi-y. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 53 

Another result of this agitation is seen in the significant 
fact, that whereas the local agents and superintendents of these 
corporations were formerly largely men like Linus Child, W. S. 
Southworth and Homer Bartlett, who brought to their offices 
little or no personal knowledge of the details of manufacturing 
business ; now these places are generally filled by men brought 
up in that business, like J. S. Ludlam, Alexander G. Cumnock, 
Erastus Boyden, Thomas S. Shaw, etc. Unquestionably, the 
agents of the old school had more of general culture and a 
larger intellectual horizon ; but for turning off work abundantly 
and earning generous dividends, the men of the new school 
have been found preferable. Experience has shown that ex- 
tremely illiterate men, who spell " kabbige " with a k, and double 
the p in " copperashun," often manage mules or mule-spinners, 
cards or card-strippers, looms or weavers, more successfully than 
graduates of Dartmouth, Yale or Harvard, who have had no per- 
sonal training in the mill. But I hasten to add, that none of the 
new-school men named above are open to this reproach of Beoe- 
tian illiteracy. 

The efforts of Mr. Ayer for the reformation of our manu- 
facturing system were not prompted by personal hostility to- 
wards the coterie then in power, though that coterie arrayed 
itself at once, (as he had expected,) against him and his meas- 
ures and all who favored those measures. The battle which he 
fought, and which he finally won, was not his own battle merely. 
It was the battle of the people — the battle of the widow, the 
orphan, the invalid, and every small stockholder, against a 
coterie that had captured their property, and that absorbed their 
profits. Had Mr. Ayer sought to benefit himself alone, he need- 
ed not to make a single foe. He had only to say, I want this 
Treasurership for this friend, and that Directorship for that 
friend ; and his wishes would have been gratified. I could 



54 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

name more than one pse^ido-rei'on^nQr vvlio took that course and 
obtained his price. Again, Mr. Ayer might have held his peace 
for a time, and let the incompetent helmsmen then at the wheels 
run their barks upon the rocks. Then he might have bought 
up one, two or three of our corporations, as Mr. Gardner has 
bought tlie Saulsbury Mills. But he scorned the ro/e of the 
wrecker, and delighted in that of the reformer. It gave him 
exquisite pleasure to see that, while filling his own vaults, he 
was also helping his neighbors to fill theirs too. 

" As a manufacturer few during the past generation have 
done greater things than Sir Titus Salt. Those great practical 
talents, and that massive force of will requisite to ensure a gi- 
gantic commercial success, have seldom," says the historian, 
" been more brilliantly exemplified than in his case." Yet, for 
keenness of discernment, untiring industry, and that strength of 
will and great force of character which triumph over every dis- 
couragement, and surmount every obstacle, Mr. Ayer suffers 
nothing by comparison with the founder of Saltaire.* 

"The salutary measures of legislation touching the corpo- 
rations, which were passed in consequence of the agitation 
started by him, were passed without his personally entering the 
legislative halls. Lowell, which year after year, for thirty years, 
sent her annual quota of hoodlums to the General Court, left the 
genius of Mr. Ayer to create its own opportunities ; and as one 
of the results of all this, his name is familiar in hundreds of 

*Memoir of Sir Titus Salt iu the National Portrait Gallery. lie was born 
in 1803, and died in 1876. .\ marble statue of him has been erected in the 
centre of Bradford, which he represented in rarliament. B}^ the manufacture 
of worsted _a;oods, he became one of the richest men in the world. He had a 
mill at SaUaire, at the time of my visit in 1868, which covered twelve acres. 
His product was 30,000 yirds of alpaca, or mixed goods, daily. His opera- 
tives lived in 600 dwelling houses, all built l)y him. He was as careful of the 
health, education and comfort of his operatives as if they were his own kith 
and kin. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 55 

cities where Lowell is known only as the place where Ayer's 
Almanac is printed, and Ayer's medicines prepared."""' 

Mr. Ayer saw the situation, and readily accepted it. " I 
know the advantages and the disadvantages of having positive 
opinions," he used to say ; " and it is not my destiny to hold pub- 
lic offices. In this country, at the present time, it is easier to fill 
the legislatures with men that have no positive opinions, and 
manipulate them so as to make them pass what measures you 
want, — than it is to elect men whose known opinions and con- 
spicuous talents arouse opposition whenever they are named. 
For myself," he would add, "I know very well, that whatever 
good or evil I may accomplish, I shall do it as a private citizen, 
or rather as a private capitalist ; and I am perfectly satisfied to 
have it so." 

In this respect, the experience of Mr. Ayer corresponded 
with that of many other men of advanced opinions and aggres- 
sive measures. 

"Men seek or take power, in obedience to instincts of our 
nature as imperious as hunger and thirst. The pursuit of fame, 
of participation in great concerns, — the endeavor to win dis- 
tinction, to act on the minds of our tellow men, — the hope that 
our names will be honored in life and live after us,— all these 
are outbursts of the ethereal spirit within us, — yearnings of 
immortality, — which, if in excess sometimes, are not the less 
the potential impulses to the performance of noble and virtuous 
deeds. Without power to do good, we cannot do it, and the 
possession of power is the first and necessary step to larger 
social usefulness. The speaker, the writer, the doer, — he who 
propagates thought or passion from the pulpit, the forum, the 
tribune, the press, or the teacher's chair, — he who commands ar- 
mies, leads senates, rules cabinets, or administers government. 



^Middlesex County Manual, p. 142. 



56 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

HE WHO INVENTS OR DISCOVERS, HE WHO CONDUCTS GREAT 

ENTERPRISES OF COMMERCE OR MANUFACTURES ; tO all these 

it has become apparent that the mind is a light which gives no 
lio-ht unless it may manifest its capabilities in words or acts, — 
that is, it attains a position in which to operate, which consti- 
tutes practical power. But with the power to do, come the 
responsibility and the solicitude which attend it, — the malice of 
interests shocked, of aspirations crossed, and of rivalries ex- 
cited ; in a word, the disenchantments of power. We find its 
advantages and its disadvantages, its allurements and its re- 
pulsions, so nicely balanced, that we take it up with less and 
less of eagerness, and lay it down with more and more of 
calmness, at each alternate change in the vicissitudes of any, 
even the most prosperous public career."""''" 

THE PORTAGE CANAL. 

Nothing can better illustrate the exquisite business talents 
and the peculiar ability of Mr. Ayer to grapple with gigantic 
enterprises, (particularly where they had become involved and 
complicated,) than the history of " The Lake Superior Ship Ca- 
nal Railroad and Iron Company." It was only when his genius 
was put to the test by obstacles which seemed to overwhelm all 
human efforts, that he rose to the full development of his splen- 
did powers. 

In 1865-6 Congress granted to the State of Michigan four 
hundred thousand acres of mineral and pine lands, situated in 
the Upper Peninsula of the State of Michigan, in aid of the 
construction of a Ship Canal on the Northern shore of Kewee- 
naw Point, to open the navigation of Portage Lake and Portage 
River through to Lake Superior, and thus facilitate the naviga- 
tion of the great lakes by allowing vessels to avoid Keweenaw 

*Caleb Cu.«hiug's Speech at Newbui^port, April 28th, 1857. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 57 

Point, one of the most dangerous passages for vessels known to 
navigation. By opening a canal a mile and a half long, con- 
nection would be made with the Portage River, affording a short 
cut through the point, lessening the distance that vessels had to 
make around the point by not less than one hundred and ten 
miles, besides affording an excellent harbor on the route from 
Duluth to Buffalo. 

This inestimable advantage to transportation through the 
lakes was secured, it may be said, wholly through the fore- 
thought of Mr. Ayer 

The State of Michigan, in order to avail itself of the grants 
from Congress, turned them over to the Portage Lake and Lake 
Superior Ship Canal Company, ( now the Lake Superior 
Ship Canal Railway and Iron Company, ) together with the 
rights and franchises to contract and operate this canal, and 
hypothecate the lands to raise money for that purpose. 

The company thereupon issued its bonds, and Mr. Ayer 
became one of the largest purchasers. The money thus raised, 
had been exhausted in the work on the canal, but without finish- 
ing it, when, in March, 1873, it was discovered that the company 
was without funds, its canal incomplete, and its lands about to 
lapse to the Government for the nonfulfillment of the condition 
of the grant, which required that the canal should be completed 
within a fixed time. This, of course, would have left the com- 
pany bankrupt, and the bondholders without security. At this 
juncture, Mr. Ayer went to Washington and succeeded in 
getting Congress to extend the time for completing the canal. 
This done, he conceived the idea of putting the canal into the 
hands of a receiver for completion, and forthwith applied to the 
United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of New 
York, through the trustees for the first mortage bondholders, for 
the appointment of a receiver to take possession of the canal. 



58 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

with power to create certificates of indebtedness which should 
be a first lien upon the company's lands, above all other mort- 
gages. 

With the money thus raised from the sale of the receiver's 
certificates, (of which Mr. Ayer became the purchaser of a large 
amount,) the receiver completed the canal in time to save the 
lands from lapsing to the Government. This interference of a 
Court of Equity to preserve to bondholders their security by cre- 
ating, practically, a new mortgage prior to all other mortgages, 
to enable a receiver to prevent waste, was novel ; and this case 
has since become a precedent for many others in the courts. 
Similar action had previously been taken in the case of the Bos- 
ton, Hartford and Erie Railroad, with which Mr. Ayer had been 
familiar, and from which he doubtless derived the idea which he 
afterwards so admirably applied in behalf of the development 
of the country through the completion of this road. 

Previous to, and following this action, were a number of 
years of cumbrous litigation growing out of opposition to the 
foreclosure of the mortgages, in which five suits were instituted, 
covering four millions of dollars, and necessitating the employ- 
ment, in all, of a dozen lawyers, and in which Mr. Ayer acted as 
prime director. Never was his clear intellect and masterly ex- 
ecutive ability more highly apparent than here.'"" 

The biographer of the famous George Stephenson — the man 
to whom "the world is mainly indebted for the locomotive rail- 
way system," and the systematizer of portable relief — finds no 
higher praise to bestow upon him than this, that he was one of 
the " pioneers of civilization,"}" and was instrumental in opening 
up new and fertile territories ol vast extent — the food-ground of 

*In Re Lake Superior Ship Canal and Iron Company, 10 National Bank- 
rnptcy Rep. TU; Jerome v. McCarter, 21 Wallace, 17. 
tSmiles' Life of Stephenson, p. vii. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 59 

future nations." The builder ol the Portage Canal is fairly en- 
titled to similar recognition. 

REDUCTION OF ORES. 

In 1865 he secured from the United States Government, 
three patents for his invention of "an effectual process for the 
disintegration of rocks and ores, and the desulphurization of 
the same, by the application of liquid and liquid solutions to 
them while in a heated state." 

Writing upon this discovery, Mr Ayer says, — "The costly 
process of grinding and stamping gold ores in part defeats 
itself The metal is generally found as free gold or uncom- 
bined. Pulverizing the rock that contains it comminutes the 
gold exceedingly fine ; much of it as fine as gold-leaf would be 
if ground with glass into an impalpable powder. 

"A large portion of these minute particles always eludes the 
mercury, in the usual mode of amalgamation. Powdered rock, 
however fine, is found, under the microscope, to be merely split 
into pieces. It is still in granules and little masses which con- 
tain gold within themselves, and is, of course, inaccessible to 
the mercury. Hence, by the means now in use, a portion of the 
metals is never liberated, while the portion released is reduced 
so fine that much of it escapes. Consequently from twenty to 
forty per cent, only of the gold in ores, is obtained by the pres- 
ent systems of stamping, grinding, and amalgamation. 

''My process disintegrates the rock into its atoms, while it 
does not divide the precious metals therein contained. The 
extraordinary molecular separation of its particles, is shown by 
the fact that the hardest quartz, although as clear as glass, will, 
after being subjected to this process, absorb water like a 
sponge. 



6o REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

"It consists in the contact of liquid, saline, and alkaline 
solutions, to heated ore, and the continued aj^plication thereof 
until complete disaggregation is effected. The effect of water 
upon heated rock, to crack and split it, has of course long been 
known, but no more. Here is where my invention begins. 
The continued and skilful application of the above named 
agents, slowly but surely destroys the molecular adhesion of the 
integral particles of the stone. 

"It becomes friable antl crimibles, or may easily be crum- 
bled, into dust. The gold is released trom its confinement and 
is in a condition for absorption, by mercury. Silver is reduced 
to one of its salts, or to the metallic state, as the case may be, 
ready for smelting or amalgamation. 

"The great points obtained by this discovery, are: 

"1st. The mtegral separation of stone into its atoms, 
which grinding, stamping, or pulverizing, can but imperfectly 
accomplish. 

"2nd. Desulphurization of sulphuretted rocks and ores, 
and their purification from contaminating metals. 

"3rd. Expulsion of the volatile metals. 

"4th. O.xydization of the base metals and the separation 
therefrom of the precious metals held in combination. 

"The costly machinery and power for stamping is dis- 
pensed with. The whole apparatus required for my treatment 
is cheaj), and may be easily built anywhere. The materials for 
working it are abmulant at almost every mine. 

"It will yield, as a working average, from eighty to ninety 
per cent, ot the precious metals contained in any variety of ore 
or rock. 

"It will extract the precious metals at less cost than any 
other process yet discovered, and I believe at one-half the cost 
of the stamping process or the arastras mill." 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 6i 

T quote from an elaborate letter written by him upon this 
subject to the "Chemical Gold and Silver Ore Reducing Com- 
pany," to which company he subsequently sold his patents. 
This letter closed in these words : "Having worked this prob- 
lem through my field of labor, I transfer my right and interest 
therein to you ; with the confident belief that you will more 
readily introduce it into use, and afford better facilities tor rend- 
ering it available to my countrymen." 

Half consciously and half unconsciously, Mr. Ayer here 
reveals the ambition, which burned within him through lile, to 
be useful, in some distinguished manner, to his fellow men, and 
to enable them to fight under better conditions the strenuous 
battle of life. 

ROCHESTER WATER WORKS. 

Mr. Ayer purchased the franchises and property of a com- 
pany organized under the laws of New York for the purpose of 
supplying with water the city of Rochester with a population of 
eighty thousand. Although he was unable to complete this 
enterprise during his life, because of the subsequent attempt 
through the New York legislature to defraud him of his fran- 
chises ; it nevertheless is a striking example of the enterprise 
and daring of the man, and the versatility and fearlessness of 
his genius. 

When the action of the Legislature was taken, he had 
already laid out over $150,000, in the construction of water- 
works for the city. He was then obliged to commence lawsuits 
against the city, to maintain his rights, and the water is still the 
subject of legislation.* 



*Iu the Matter of the Application of the Rochester Water Commissioners 
to ac(iuire Laud.* of tiie Rochester Water Company, 66 New Yoi'k, 413-423 



62 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

Mr. Ayer was never satisfied with the course taken by the 
city of Rochester in relation to this enterprise. He enjoyed 
many a joke at the city's expense. I have seen him laugh with 
a laugh that pervaded the whole man from head to heel, at the 
ludicrous combination of ideas which marked a certain speech 
by Daniel Webster, at Rochester. It is hardly necessary to say 
that the speech was made after a dinner, at which Mr. Webster 
had imbibed rather too freely of jsome ancient brandy. 

" Men of Rochester," — said Mr. Webster, — " I am glad to 
see you, and I am glad to see your noble city. Gentlemen, I 
saw your falls, which I am told are one hundred and fifty feet 
high. That is a very interesting fact. Gentlemen, Rome had 
her Caesar, her Scipio, and her Brutus ; but Rome, in her palmi- 
est days, had never a waterfall one hundred and fifty feet high ! 
Gentlemen, Greece had her Pericles, her Demosthenes, and her 
Socrates ; but Greece, in her palmiest days, had never a water- 
fall one hundred and fifty feet high. Men of Rochester, go on. 
No people ever lost their liberties, who had a waterfall one hun- 
dred and fifty feet high." 

LOWELL AND ANDOVER RAILPOAD. 

For nearly forty years, the Boston and Lowell Railroad en- 
joyed a practical monopoly of the carrying trade between the 
two cities from which it takes its name ; and its management, 
like the management of all monopolies, was characterized by 
sordid selfishness and a short-sightedness that argued a u-ant of 
brains as well as a want of soul and heart. 

In those times, as Mr. Adams justly remarks, "the idea of 
any duty which a railroad corporation jwed to the public, was 
wholly lost sight of. In the eyes of those managing them, the 
railroads were mere private money-making enterprises. They 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 63 

acted accordingly. If they were forced to compete, they com- 
peted savagely, and without regard to consequences ; — where 
they were free from competition, [as the Lowell road then was,] 
they exacted the uttermost farthing. There naturally ensued a 
system of sudden fluctuations [in fares and freights] and inequi- 
table local discriminations."* 

The amount of freight then carried annually between Lowell 
and Boston, was about one hundred and fifty thousand tons. 
Four sixths of this entire amount was coal. One sixth was cot- 
ton, while the remaining sixth consisted of wool, iron, lumber, 
manufactured goods, etc. On all articles the freight rates were 
excessive. Thus, the people of Lowell were required to pay 
fifty cents a ton, (amounting in the aggregate to $50,000 a year,) 
for freight on coal, above and beyond what was paid by the peo- 
ple of Lawrence ; though the distance from Boston was a mile 
less than to Lawrence. f 

The business of J. C. Ayer and Company involved a con- 
siderable outlay for freights ; and Mr. Ayer could neither brook 
to be thus defrauded himself, nor to see his neighbors defrauded ; 
for in his view, the imposition of excessive rates for freights or 
fares, by corporations deriving their very existence from the 
public, was a fraud in fact, whatever it might be in law. 

At length, the exactions of the Boston and Lowell Rail- 
road, and the failure of its managers to satisfy the wants of the 
community, provoked the organization of the Lowell and Ando- 
ver Railroad, in which corporation J. C. Ayer and Company 
bought nearly one-half of the stock. 

♦Charles F. Adams' Railroads : Their Origin and Problems, p. 123. 

tSee the testimony of Tappan Wentwortli, Frederick Ayer, Charles 
Saunders, A. L. Brooks, S. N. Wood, John F. Manahan, Jonathan Kendall, 
and others, and the arii'unenl of Charles Cowley, in Vox Populi, Marcli 5, 
1870. 



64 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

By constructing a road ten miles in length, a connection 
was formed with the Boston and Maine Railroad at Ballardvale 
in Andover ; and thus a new and independent line was opened 
Irom Lowell to Boston. 

Mr. Ayer was not an engineer ; but he remembered that 
Patrick T. Jackson, who built the Boston and Lowell Railroad 
nearly forty years before, was not an engineer; and, like Jack- 
son, he entered upon the work, " full of confidence in his own 
energy, and in the power, which he always possessed, of eliciting 
and directing the talents of others. "••■■ 

Mr. Ayer personally examined every foot of the way over 
which this new road was to be built,f and gave personal atten- 
tion to the selection of the line of the road, as well as to the 
construction of the road-bed. He spared himself no toil or travel 
to carry this enterprise successfully through ; and the result ex- 
ceeded his anticipations. 

Referring to Mr. Jackson and the building of the Boston 
and Lowell Railroad, Mr. Lowell says, in the memoir already 
quoted, — "The road was opened for travel in 1835, and experi- 
ence justified the wisdom of his anticipations. Its completion 
and successful operation were a great relief to Mr. Jackson. 
For several years it had engrossed his time and attention, and 
at times deprived him of sleep. He felt it to be a public trust, 
the responsibility of which was of a nature quite different from 
that which had attended his previous enterprises." 

Every word of this is equally applicable, mutatis mutandis, 
to Mr. Ayer and the building of the Lowell and Andover Rail- 
road. In fact, Mr. Ayer and Mr. Jackson had many traits in 
common ; and it would not be difficult to point out, in the man- 



*Loweir.s Sketch of Jackson, in Contributions of the Old Residents' 
Historical Association, Lowell, vol 1, ]). 204. 

flOdward M. Sargent accompanied him on one of his trips of inspection. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 65 

ner of Plutarch, the correspondences, as well as the contrasts, 
which existed between these extraordinary men. 

AN INTEROCEANIC CANAL. 

The greatest of all the enterprises that ever occupied the 
mind of Mr. Ayer, was that of a canal to unite the Atlantic and 
Pacific oceans. He had canvassed the merits of every route that 
had been proposed for such a canal. There are eight of these 
routes, which, beginning with the most Northern and thence 
proceeding to the most Southern, are called, respectively, the 
Tehuantepec, Honduras, Nicaragua, Chiriqui, Panama, San Bias, 
Darien, and Atrato routes."-'' 

Each of these routes has found strenuous advocates. Thus, 
the Tehuantepec route was urged by the great Cortez ; the Hon- 
duras, by E. G. Squier; the Nicaragua, by J. L. Stephens ; the 
Darien, by Dr. Cullen ; while the Panama, which is the shortest 
but the most difficult of all, has had a legion of friends. The 
Atrato route had a special attraction for Mr. Ayer, because its 
practicability was actually demonstrated, in 178S, by the open- 
ing of a canoe canal between the two oceans. f By the Canal of 
the Raspadura, only three miles in length, across the Isthmus 
of San Pablo, the Rio de la Raspadura, which empties into the 
San Pablo, and, by the Quito and the Atrato, connects with the 

*See the learned paper on the Junction of the Athmtic and Pacific 
Oceans, and the practicability of a Ship Canal, without Locks, by the vallej^ 
of the Atrato, read by the late Frederick M. Kelley, of New York, I)efore the 
Institution of Civil Engineers of Great Britain, at Westminster, in 18.5G, and 
printed l)y permission of the Council. See also the Report of Admiral Davis 
on Interoceanic Canals in 180H; also. Captain Selfridge's Report of his Explo- 
rations in 1870, etc. 

tThe canal was excavated by the Indians under the superintendence of 
a monk. See Baron von Humboldt's letter to Mr. Kelley in the paper already 
quoted. 



66 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

Atlantic, was joined with the San Juan de Chirambira, which 
flows into the Pacific. 

Before Mr. Ayer's time, Baron von Humboldt, Robert 
Stephenson, Admiral Fitzroy of the British Navy, and many 
other eminent men, had favoied this route ; and the latest ex- 
plorations for this object, by the Americans, the French, and the 
British, all tend to show that the line of the Atrato is the true 
line for a water communication between the two oceans. 

Mr. Kelley points out the following four advantages, which 
seem to give this route the pre-eminence over all others : 

1st. That the two oceans can be thus united, by an open 
channel, without locks, or any other impediment. 

2nd. That the width and depth of these channels are 
sufficient to allow of the simultaneous passage, up and down, at 
all times, of the largest class of vessels. 

3rd. That excellent harbors exist at both ends of this 
route, requiring but little improvement, and perfectly accessible 
at all times. 

4th. That it passes through a country in undisputed pos- 
session of a legal government, and among a people favorable,- 
instead of hostile, to the undertaking. 

This route is wholly within the Republic of Colombia, 
which has repeatedly evinced a friendliness amounting to almost 
an enlightened enthusiasm in favor of this canal. 

It is not to be expected that any private citizen, or body of 
private citizens, will accomplish this great enterprise until our 
government shall evince an interest in the work similar to that 
evinced by the Republic of Colombia, But while all de- 
partments at Bogata have repeatedly shown a willingness to aid 
this great international work, the Senate of the United States 
has supinely suffered the treaty for such a canal, which Mr. 
Cushing negotiated in 1869, and which he justly regarded as a 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 67 

more memorable achievement than even his treaty with China, 
to remain without being confirmed or rejected, for ten years. 

All previous grants from the Colombian Congress having 
expired by limitation, the failure of the Senate to confirm the 
Gushing Treaty has brought this great project practically to a 
stand-still. This delay was not the fault of President Grant, for 
he sent it to the Senate with his cordial approval ; nor was it 
the fault of the late Senator Sumner, for, as Chairman of the 
Committee on Foreign Affairs, he reported this treaty back to 
the Senate with that committee's approval ; but still the treaty 
has not been confirmed. 

During the Civil War and later, Mr. Ayer entered exten- 
sively into lumber-manufacturing in Florida, building large mills 
there, and directing their management from Lowell. In short, 
the extent and multiplicity of the enterprises in which he 'en- 
gaged, and in which he always held the reins, is known only to 
his immediate associates. 

LIBERAL STUDIES. 

In the midst of all these enterprises, — more than sufficient 
in number and variety to exhaust the capacity of any ordinary 
man, — Mr. Ayer found time for generous studies. — With him, it 
was never too late to learn. After he had completed half a cen- 
tury of life, with the help of his friend, Jos6 C. Rodrigues,* he 
learned the Portuguese language, and read in the original the 
great poem of Camoens — Os Ljtsiadas. 

When Mr. Ayer studied Portuguese, Mr. Rodrigues says, 
"he found time enough to give it nearly three hours a day, about 
one and a half with me and the rest memorizing late at night 

♦Editor of Novo Mundo, and-of the Bevista Industrial, two Portuguese 
journals, published in New York, and circulated In Brazil. 



68 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

and early in the morning. He was earnest in every thing he 
undertook to do." 

The fact that Alfieri learned Greek after he was forty-six 
years old, has often been mentioned to his praise. But Alfieri 
was a poet, and study was the only occupation of his life ; while 
Mr. Ayer was a manufacturer, engrossed with the care and man- 
agement of a vast business, and was also, at the same^'time, a 
large capitalist, engrossed with the care of vast investments in 
twenty different states. 

It was with reference to men like Mr. Ayer, who keep their 
hearts forever fresh and young, that Shakespeare said, " Old 
age is unnecessary." In like manner, Longfellow, in Morituri 
Sahitamus^ exclaims — 

"It is too late ! Ah, nothing is too late 
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. 
Cato learned Greek at eighty ; Sophocles 
Wrote his grand QEdipus, and Simonides 
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers, . 
When each had numbered more than four-score years ; 
And Theophrastus, at four-score and ten 
Had but begun his Characters of Men. 
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales, 
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales ; 
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, 
Completed Faust when eighty years were past. 
These are indeed exceptions ; but they show 
How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow 
Into the Arctic regions of our lives, 
Where little else than life itself survives." 
In the last days of his active life, as well as in the first years 
of his business career, Mr. Ayer found time for reading, and for 
reflecting on what he read. He was always an acute and grasp- 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 69 

ing student ; and his library abounds, not only in the works of 
science and general literature, in which he loved to make excur- 
sions in his maturer years, but also in the Greek and Latin po- 
ets and historians which enchanted his youth. 

" Read not the Times ; read the Eternities," said Thoreau. 
Mr. Ayer read both. He dipped into all sorts of authors, the 
grave, the gay, the lively, the severe. But his favorites at all 
times were the immortals, — " those on whom the endurance of 
their works has set the seal of excellence ; which are read from 
age to age, from era to era, and prove, by the tenacity of their 
hold, their correspondence with the humanity which, under all 
changes, remains the same."--" 

Lucretius is an author not included in any college curricu- 
lum. Few but the ripest scholars read him. Lord Macaulay 
read him twice. Whether Mr. Ayer read Lucretius through 
more than once, I know not, but his copy of that poet is marked 
in many places with his ready pencil. He was also particularly 
fond of Horace, and often encouraged the young by quoting to 
them that famous line, — 

" I, bone, quo virtus tua te vocat ; I pede fausto."f 

" Go, my dear fellow, wherever your faculties direct ; and 
success go with you." 

Carlyle expresses this thought of Horace in his own terse 
and graphic way : " Find out what you can do, and do it, and 
leave the rest to the gods." 

THE RAID OF JOHN BROWN. 

Mr. Ayer seldom took much interest in general politics. 
One of the few speeches made by him was delivered in Hunt- 
ington Hall, Lowell, December 29th, 1859, at a meeting called 

♦Froude's Short Studies on Great Subjects. Third Series, p. 150. 
•fHorace, Epistolarum, Liber 2, Epist. 2, line ;^7. 



•JO REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

to " deprecate the raid of John Brown," so famous in story and 
in song. 

" He captured Harper's Ferry 

With his nineteen men so true, 
And frightened Old Virginia 

Till she trembled through and through." 
Now that John Brown's song has become a national anthem, 
and Brown himself has come to be regarded as a saint, a sage, 
a hero, and a martyr ; it is difficult to put oneself in sympathy 
with these meetings of deprecation. 

We seem to have passed several generations since John 
Brown's body hung between heaven and earth — a spectacle for 
gods as well as men: But it is nevertheless a fact that the peo- 
ple of the South were greatly alarmed at that raid, and that 
good and true men at the North felt it to be their duty to sooth 
the fears of their southern countrymen by calling meetings in 
the several cities and passing resolutions of deprecation. In the 
Lowell meeting, Republicans as well as Democrats took promi- 
nent parts. The late Oliver M. Whipple presided, and the Rev. 
Dr. Edson offered prayer. Mr. Ayer presented the following 
resolutions, which were unanimously adopted, and supplemented 
them with the following speech : — 

Whereas, It is alleged that the people of the North favor the sedi- 
tious teachings, and countenance the treasonable acts that have culmi- 
nated in an invasion of a sovereign State of this Confederacy, and that 
we design, b}' our political action, to infringe upon the guaranteed rights 
of the Southern States ; therefore, 

Resolved, That we, the citizens of Lowell, view with utter detesta- 
tion the acts and designs of John Brown and his confederates, and be- 
lieve that they have suffered but the just penalty of their crimes. 

Resolved, That we disapprove of any and all attempts to interfere 
with the rights and internal policy of our sister States. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 71 

Resolved, That we discountenance sectional fanaticism, whether 
North or South, and will resist it, its teachings and purposes, by all 
legitimate means. 

Resolved, That we hold the perpetuity of the Federal Union para- 
mount to all other considerations, as being the chief basis of the liber- 
ties we have inherited from our fathers, and that it is a duty we owe to 
ourselves, to our children, as well as to the cause of liberty throughout 
the world, to transmit it unimpaired to posterity. 

MR. AYER'S speech. 

"Mr. President — From circumstances which have transpir- 
ed, from acts of public men and of individuals, it is believed by 
large numbers of our fellow-countrymen in the South, that the 
people of the North desire and intend to accomplish the aboli- 
tion of Slavery in the Southern States. There are politicians 
in the South whose interest it is to spread this belief, to blazen 
the acts which give color to it, and to procure the general dis- 
semination of this conviction among their constituents, in order 
that they may constitute themselves the great, the indispensable 
defenders of their peoples' rights. 

"Now, fellow-citizens, since there are facts which might give 
ground for this presumption, it is proper for us to consider and 
to express whether we mean any such thing. If we do, it must 
be from motives of philanthropy alone. Then let us inquire 
whether the abolition of Slavery is in fact a measure of phi- 
lanthropy." 

Mr. Ayer then presented a rapid survey of the condition of 
the negro race— announcing, at the outset, the proposition, so 
startling to Northern ears, that "Slavery, rather than Freedom, 
has been its normal condition." He continued : — 

"At the present time one-half of the negro population in 
Africa is held in servitude by the other half, and this has been 



72 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

nearly its condition for centuries. That it is almost natural to 
the African is seen in the fact that, oY these many million slaves, 
nearly every slave could have his freedom by taking it. A few 
miles' run into the woods would place him beyond the reach of 
his master ; and yet he, and his fathers before him, have con- 
tentedly spent their lives as bondmen. 

"Have you not seen the same thing there, in Virginia, 
where the white population of Harper's Ferry sat for two days 
in abject fear, saying by their actions, to the blacks, 'Go where 
you will, but oh ! spare our lives ;' and not one negro would 
walk away to treedom. 

"Look at the black man in his native home in Africa, the 
veriest savage that the world aftbrds ; but one remove from the 
brute, and sometimes scarcely that. Compare his condition 
there with his condition on the plantation of the South. Here 
he has more labor, but with it security and provision for his 
health and daily wants. There he has none of these. The ab- 
sence of substantial government over the whole of negro-land, 
leaves him no protection to build him a permanent house for 
shelter. More or less exposed to the inclemency of a burning 
sky, disease overtakes him without protection or relief, and he 
perishes. 

"His average term of life is but little over one-half of what 
it is in this country. Even that is spent in constant danger. 
Security of life and limb he never knows. An inroad of war- 
riors or slave hunters may any night burn his dwelling and his 
scanty store, steal what of his family is worth stealing, and 
murder with horrible brutality the balance. Their usual mode 
of killing an enemy is, to cut his leg off and leave him to die of 
the wound. Travellers will tell you of the revolting cruelty 
practised where villages have been ravaged and the ground 
strewn with the inhabitants, thus inhumanly maimed and left 
to die. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 73 

"If we would fairly contemplate the abolition of Slav'ery, 
» 
as a measure of benevolence to the negro, we must consider 

what will be the negro's condition when he is free. There are 
examples from which conclusions can be adduced. 

"The American Counsel at Demarara, Doctor Craigen, has 
been for many years my personal friend. He is a native of 
New Hampshire, and not likely to have a natural perdilection 
for Slavery. He tells me, of his own experience and knowl- 
edge, that until the abolition of Slavery in that province by the 
Dutch government, there was hardly a more prosperous country 
on the face of the globe. Surinam, the port, was filled with 
vessels carrying and bringing the products of human toil, for 
the increase of human enjoyment. The country was thickly 
populated with negro slaves, apparently happy here and con- 
tent with their lot. But, as he expresses it, philanthropy got 
possession of the Dutch government, most of whom never saw 
a slave on a plantation in their lives ; and in an evil hour they 
abolished Slavery in Demarara. Now, says he, all has changed; 
the richest plantations have become depopulated and valueless 
— may be had for the asking of the local government, though 
unfortunately they are not worth asking. You could do noth- 
ing with one when you got it. The white man cannot cultivate 
it, and the blacks will not. Negroes are strolling the country, 
without a home, perishing from sickness and want. The wharves 
of Surinam, once so busy, may now be seen overgrown with 
rank grass of the tropics ; and here and there a negro family is 
seen domiciled under a shed, famishing and rotting with diseas- 
es that are loathsome to look upon. He says there can be no 
question that the abolition of Slavery has been a misfortune, an 
unmitigated curse to the negro race in Demarara. The same 
result has followed the same experiment in St. Domingo, Hayti, 
Trinidad ; and where has it not .' 



74 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

"Bad as their condition may seem to us, where on the face 
of the earth is any considerable number of negroes better situ- 
ated for the enjoyment of life, than those on the American 
plantations ? 

"The Bishop of Liberia, who is one of the most intelligent 
men I ever met, although as black as ebony, says of the native 
negro there : 'You may hire him, and for a few days, or even 
weeks, he will work well ; but ere long his natural indolence 
comes over him, and then neither gew-gaws nor money — noth- 
ing — can induce him to work any more." 

"The negro has strong muscles and a willing hand; but it is 
not in his nature to work without a master." 

Hence Mr. Ayer argued that, "if the exuberant wealth of 
the tropics is to be developed at all, it must be through the in- 
strumentality of slave labor." Had Mr. Ayer foreseen, — what 
he afterwards witnessed in the Era of Emancipation, — that 
crops would be produced in the South by free labor, exceeding 
in value the crops of the most productive year of slave labor, — 
he would doubtless have revised or excised several parts of his 
speech. 

" Under a tropical sun," he continued, "the Anglo-Saxon 
cannot mainly cultivate the soil. He is constitutionally inca- 
pable of it. The Latin races can do it but indifferently. If the 
fields of rice, cotton and sugar in the far South are to be culti- 
vated at all, it must be by the black man ; for the white man 
cannot do it, and the free black man will not. Let us not be 
suspected of any sneer at philanthropy, for that is one of the 
noblest emotions of the heart, and especially so when, as on 
this question, it arises in behalf of a poorer, weaker fellow man. 
But it is fair, and, sir, it is wise in us to consider whether the 
abolition of Slavery in the South, or at least anything which we 
can do for it, is in fact a measure of benevolence. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 75 

"I am satisfied that it is not ; 1 believe that the people of 
Lowell and of Massachusetts are satisfied that they have not 
the right, even if they had the inclination, to interfere with the 
institution of Slavery where it exists ; and I also believe, sir, 
that they have not the inclination. 

"But let us not be suspected, either, of any willingness for 
its extension. I, sir, trust it will never spread over another foot 
of soil that can be cultivated without it. I desire this, because 
I prefer that the higher accomplishments and more active ca- 
pacities of the white man should occupy and possess the land 
where he can live and thrive. There is reason to believe, with 
Senator Seward, that it is among the inevitable destinies of the 
future that the Anglo-Saxon shall occupy this whole continent. 

"As his spread westward has driven the red man into the 
Western sea, so will the increase of his numbers and strength 
Southward, as he becomes acclimated, in the slow process of 
time, drive the black man into the Gulf of Mexico. But this is 
far in the future ; only the long lapse of years can accomplish 
it. Our action cannot, nor is the burthen of its consummation 
upon us. The intermeddling of agitators can only disturb mas- 
ter and slave, infiicting injustice upon the one and injury upon 
the other, without benefit to either or to anybody. 

"If we look to our right to meddle in this matter, we shall 
find that we have none. That we cannot touch it without posi- 
tive wrong — without breaking the compact under which we 
have arrived to be one of the powerful nations of the earth. 
But, sir, this question of our right ceases to be of interest when 
we conclude, as I think we must, that we have no intention or 
desire whatever to interfere with Slavery where it is. 

"We must leave that in the hands of Him who does all thing's 
well, and who seems to have decreed that in his own good time 
the Anglo-Saxon — the foremost among the races of men — shall 



je REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

have this gigantic continent for his own, to people and possess 
it ; — a heritage on which to grow his raiment and his food, on 
which to build his Railroads, Factories, Ships, his Churches, 
Colleges and Schools." 

General Butler followed Mr. Ayer in a speech in which he 
portrayed William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other 
abolitionists, as men without business or a stake in the commu- 
nity — " occupying every stump — prominent in every canvas — 
loudmouthed, brawling — vehement in invective — bitter in sar- 
casm — practiced in tropes — each figure drawn from the direst 
passions — each hyperbole gilded with gall, — each sentence dis- 
colored with spleen, — each word tinged with bitterness, — rhetor- 
ical gladiators with professions of charity and love to the human 
race on their tongues, but murder and treason in their hearts, — 
claiming the emancipation of the slave to a liberty which would 
be a doubtful boon, at the expense of the destruction of every 
roof-tree, the desolation of every hearth-stone, and the blood of 
the nation." 

Little did Mr. Ayer then imagine the Republican party 
would ever support him as their candidate for Congress. Little 
did General Butler then expect that the same party would three 
times elect him to Congress, and that Wendell Phillips would 
lead the band of "rhetorical gladiators" who have sought again 
and again to make him Governor of the Commonwealth! 

CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN. 

When the Southern States were reconstructed by freed- 
men and carpet-baggers after the Civil War, seats in either 
branch of Congress were bought and sold, without scruple ; the 
only conditions being, that the purchaser should profess himself 
a Republican, and should pay liberally for his place. Mr. Ayer 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. -jy 

was a Republican, and wealthy. He owned large estates in 
Florida, and was doing an extensive business there in lumber. 
He was accordingly offered, naturally enough, one of the seats 
in the United States Senate, which belonged to that State. 

He did not make the purchase ; but the notoriety of the 
offer brought him to the notice of men in his own State as one 
eminently fit to represent themselves. 

In 1872, the Congressional Districts of Massachusetts 
were reconstructed, and many personal friends of Mr. Ayer 
signified their wish to have him elected to Congress. He re- 
ceived a liberal vote in the Convention; but the nomination was 
given to E. R. Hoar, who had formerly been a Judge of the 
Supreme Court of the State, and more recently Attorney-Gen- 
eral of the United States. Mr. Ayer acquiesced, and gave a 
magnanimous support to his successful competitor. 

Judge Hoar made but an inferior figure in Congress, and 
wisely declined a renomination. Mr. Ayer was then on his sec- 
ond tour in Europe ; but his friends in the Seventh District, 
embracing Lowell and Lawrence, presented his name to the 
Republican Convention, and secured him the nomination. 

The hand of death was already outstretched for Mr. Ayer ; 
an incurable malady had seized upon him ; and his election 
would unquestionably have hastened his end. His defeat, 
though certain lifelong Republicans, like Judge Hoar, contribu- 
ted to it, was a great misfortune to the Republican party. 
What is more, it prepared the way for the election of Benjamin 
F. Butler in 1876, and that of William A. Russell in 1878, and 
other notable events. 

His defeat did not disappoint him ; nor did he, like the fox 
in the fable, suddenly pretend to discover that the grapes be- 
yond his reach were sour. He was a good deal inclined, at 
times, to Fatalism ; and the thought that a Congressional career 



jS REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

was actually before him, never took that firm possession of his 
mind, which most of his enterprises did. 

I recall without regret the fact that I supported his candi- 
dature on personal grounds ; because I knew alike the purpose 
and the capability of the man to render effective service in Con- 
gress ; because I thought he deserved such an expression of the 
good-will of his fellow-citizens ; and because I believed it would 
be for the interest of Lowell and the country generally that he 
should have the gratifications incident to one or two terms of 
Congressional life. 

The course taken by Ebenezer R. Hoar on this occasion is 
not easy to explain. He had supported successively Chauncy 
L. Knapp, Charles R. Train, George S. Boutwell, George M. 
Brooks, and Constantine C. Esty, without stopping to inquire 
whether any of them were fit for the place. But when Mr. Ayer's 
name was presented, Judge Hoar had a sudden attack of fastid- 
iousness, which induced him to " bolt the nomination," and assist 
in the election of John K. Tarbox. 

I have known all these gentlemen for many years, and I 
have no hesitation in saying that, in force of character and in 
general power of mind, not one of them, nor ytuige Hoar him- 
self, can claim any superiority over Mr. Ayer. With the excep- 
tion of General Butler, I think no man has represented the 
Lowell District in Congress, since the retirement of General 
Cushing in 1843, who was equal, in the extent and variety of his 
abilities, much less in original creative genius, to James C. Ayer. 

Mr. Ayer was at Bonn when the nomination was made, and 
immediately wrote to his trusty lieutenant, Benjamin Walker: 

"We returned from the valley of the Ahr last evening, 
where I wrote you a short description thereof; and while writing 
Birdseye on cotton-spinning this morning, I was handed two 
Cablegrams, one from you, and one from Rodrigues, informing 



reminiscencp:s OP^ JAMES C. AYER. 79 

me of my nomination. It has met with so much opposition 
hitherto that I did not anticipate that result ; and I know 1 must 
credit some one or more (with you among the number) a great 
deal ol obligation, for its realization. It proves so gratifying to 
my wife and daughter, and our friends here, that I appreciate 
the honor to-day altogether more than ever before. Under this 
condition I hardly need say, I intend to remember with grati- 
tude those to whom I am indebted for the distinction." 

After suggesting that the balm of consolation be applied 
to his defeated competitors, that the party contributions be lib- 
erally and promptly paid, that money be provided for the mean 
and the mercenary, and also for the needy and seedy, — he con- 
tinues, — refering with special solicitude to those whose invalu- 
able aid "ought to be paid with more tJiaii money": — 

"Knowing that I shoidd be indebted to such men," he says, 
"I have already bought some beautiful bronze vases and objects 
of art for this purpose. But if I knew of any especial cases, I 
would try to provide for them in Paris. High objects of art are 
exceedingly difficult to get, in accordance with any body's taste, 
but one's own. I fail to see any beauty or attraction in many 
things that people buy here at extravagant prices. Old pitchers* 
urns, vases, etc., in crockery or bronze or silver, that were un- 
sightly in the beginning, and that age has made hideous, are sold 
at extravagant prices. The taste for them may be cultivated to 
a passion, like the taste for old saints' heads, which prevails 
among almost all people. Paintings of hard-looking old devils 
are sold at prices above modern paintings. If you can make 
me any suggestions, they may be servicable — and they may not." 

The following is an exhibit of the Congressional vote in 
Massachusetts at the elections of 1872 and 1874 — showing the 
difference between the Republican vote in 1872 and the same 
vote in 1874. 



So 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 



FIRST DISTRICT. 

In 1872, James Buffinton (R) received 

Joseph M. Day (D) 

In 1874, James Buffinton (R) " 

Louis Lapham (D) 

Republican loss, 

SECOND DISTRICT. 

In 1872, Benjamin W. Harris (R) received 
" " Edward Avery (D) " 

In 1 874, Benjamin W. Harris (R) " 

" " Edward Avery (D) 

Republican loss, 

THIRD DISTRICT. 

In 1872, William Whiting (R) received 

" " Samuel C. Cobb (D) 

In 1874, Henry L. Pierce (R) " 

" " Benjamin Dean (D) " 

Republican loss, 

FOURTH DISTRICT. 

In 1872, Samuel Hooper (R) received 

" Leopold Morse (D) 

In 1874, Rufus S. Frost (R) 

" Josiah G. Abbott* (D) 
Republican loss, 

FIFTH DISTRICT. 

In 1872, Daniel W. Gooch (R) received 

" " Nathaniel P. Banks (D) 

In 1874, Nathaniel P. Banks (D) 

" " Daniel W. Gooch (R) 
Republican loss. 



12,441 votes. 

2,609 " 
9,927 

4,117 " 

2,514 " 

13,752 votes. 

5,090 " 

9,651 " 

6,688 " 
4,101 

8,931 votes. 

5,139 " 
8,011 
4,927 

920 " 

8,715 " 
6,762 

5,717 " 
6,429 

3,008 " 

12,472 votes. 

8,039 " 

13,433 
7,263 

5,209 " 



*See Report of the Committee in Abbott v. Frost. For the other figures 
in this table see returns in Secretary of State's office. The scattering votes 
and votes of minor parties are omitted. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 



8 1 



SIXTH DISTRICT. 

In 1872, Benjamin F. Butler, (R) received 

" " Chas. P.Thompson (D) 

In 1874, Benjamin F. Butler (R) " 

" " Chas. P. Thompson (D) 
Republican loss, 

SEVENTH DISTRICT. 

In 1872, Ebenezer R. Hoar (R) received 

" " John K. Tarbox (D) 

In 1874, James C. Ayer (R) 

" " John K. Tarbox (D) 
Republican loss, 

EIGHTH DISTRICT. 

In 1872, J. M. S. Williams (R) received 

" " William W. Warren (D) 

In 1874, J. M. S. Williams (R) 

" " William W. Warren (D) 
Republican loss, 

NINTH DISTRICT. 

In 1872, George F. Hoar (R) received 

" " George F. Verry (D) " 

In 1874, George F. Hoar (R) 

" " Eli Thayer (D) 

Republican loss, 

TENTH DISTRICT. 



In 1872, Alvah Crocker (R) 

" " Daniel W. Bond (D) 

In 1874, Julius H. Seelye, (I) 

Charles A. Stevens (R) 

" " Henry C. Hill (D) 

Republican loss. 



received 



1 1, 88 1 votes. 

5.737 " 

7.747 " 
8,716 

4,134 " 

11,742 votes. 

5,989 " 

7,415 " 

S,979 " 

4,327 " 

1 1,929 votes. 

5,829 " 

7,861 •• 

8.585 " 
4,068 

12,691 votes. 

5,007 " 

9,423 
8,961 
3,268 

14,919 votes. 

4.588 " 

7.773 " 
7,353 
3.474 " 
6,566 



82 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

ELEVENTH DISTRICT. 

In 1872, Henry L. Dawes, (R) received 12,260 votes. 

J. F. Arnold (D) " 6,927 

In 1874, Henry Alexander, Jr. (R) " 6,227 

Chester W. Chapin (D) " 11,964 

Republican loss, 6,081 " 

It was no personal unpopularity — it was the general dis- 
credit into which the Republican party had fallen — that defeated 
Mr. Ayer. The same cause, on the same day, in the same State, 
defeated Mr. Frost in the F^ourth District, Mr. Gooch in the 
Fifth, General Butler in the Sixth, Mr. Williams in the FZighth, 
Mr. Stevens in the Tenth, and Mr. Alexander in the Eleventh, 
by adverse majorities generally greater than that of Mr. Ayer. 
The same cause overwhelmed the late General Dix, then a can- 
didate for Governor against Samuel J. Tilden in New York. 

Had not his health broken before the Congressional election 
in 1876, there can be little doubt that he would then have been 
elected. With but two exceptions, all the Massachusetts Dis- 
tricts which were lost by the Republicans in 1874, were recov- 
ered in [876. 

Had his father-in-law, Royal Southwick, been young enough 
to conduct this campaign, as he had done other campaigns in 
Lowell, the result might have been different. He would have 
repeated with suitable variations the tactics of 1840 — the mass 
meetings, the log cabin raisings, the hard cider drinking, the 
song singing, the Tippecanoe clubs, the caricatures, the epi- 
grams, the jokes, the universal excitement, — when General 
Harrison was sung into the presidential chair,— when Van 
Buren was laughed out of it, — when every town had its log- 
cabin, its club and its chorus, — when Tippecanoe song-books 
were sold by the hundred thousand, — when there were Tippe- 
canoe medals, Tippecanoe badges, Tippecanoe flags, Tippe- 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 83 

canoe handkerchiefs, Tippecanoe almanacs, and Tippecanoe 
shaving-soap, — when all noises were drowned in the cry 01 
" Tippecanoe and Tyler too." 

Instead of addressing merely the reason and understanding 
of the electors, or their sense of public duty, he would have 
saluted their ears with songs and salvos of artillery. He would 
have presented his candidate, not as a man intellectually largely 
superior to themselves, but as the Picker Boy of Preston, just 
as he had presented Henry Clay as "the Mill Boy of the Slashes." 
While the eyes of the electors were charmed by transparencies 
showing the boy at his picker, the inner man would have been 
filled with hard cider and Jamaica rum ! Talk of statesmanship ! 
The most ignorant elector fancys himself equal to any office that 
he can get ; and he prefers the candidate most like himself. It 
is as true now as it was in the days of Dryden : — 
" He that surpasses or subdues mankind. 
Must look down on the hate of those below." 

If Hoar had not played the role oi "the dog in the manger," 
Mr. Ayer would, unquestionably, have been elected, in spite of 
the general discredit in which his party then stood. A similar 
" bolt " would have defeated George F. Hoar, who was closely 
pressed by Eli Thayer. Judge Hoar went out to commit mur- 
der, but before he returned he committed suicide. In 1876, he 
ran as an independent candidate for Congress, against General 
Butler, and was utterly overwhelmed.* 

Mr. Ayer was not disturbed to see that Concord, Judge 
Hoar's town, gave him but thirteen votes ; for he said it was 



♦Then it was that the diri?e which Miles O'Reilly sung over Butler after 
the Fort Fisher ^asco, was resiin,<>: to an iuiproverl tune as follows : — 
Hriug the picks, and let us bury, 
On New England's rugged shore, 
Ebeuezer llockwood Hoar, &c. 



84 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

the seat and centre of that philosophy, falsely so called, which, 
according to Rufus Choate's terse epigram, " mistakes a new 
phrase for a new thought, and old nonsense for new truth ; de- 
nies God, and worships itself." 

He held Judge Hoar in small esteem. " If I could buy the 
judge," he once said, "at my valuation, and sell him at his own, 
I could make an immense fortune." His contempt for Judge 
Hoar began as early as 1862, and did not grow without a cause ; 
for he attended the Court over which Hoar presided, a part of 
two days, during the trial of the famous (or infamous) case of 
Fisk V. Fisk. At his request, I have repeatedly given an ac- 
count of that case " over the walnuts and the wine," for the in- 
formation of others of his guests ; and I will here repeat it. 

The lady who obtained this divorce, was above an average 
woman, even in New England, in education, culture and refine- 
ment, as well as in beauty of person and in graces of manner. 
Her husband was a strong, healthy, wealthy brute, doing, both 
then and now, a large and lucrative business, and maintaining 
an elegant residence. His treatment of her had for many 
years been hard, cruel, and tyrannical. His language was always 
coarse and vulgar, generally profane, and often obscene. On 
different occasions he had inflicted personal violence upon her ; 
and when to escape further assaults she withdrew with her little 
daughter to the attic, he dragged her out of the attic by the hair, 

and drove her back to his bed, saying, " D n ye, as long as I 

have got to keep ye, I aint going to sleep alone." As the result 
of all this, she became sick in body and cowed and dejected in 
mind. He resolved to get rid of her, and applied to a lawyer 
for a divorce. The lawyer investigated the facts, and told him 
there was no ground on which a divorce could be obtained. 

He then expelled his wife from the house, and deprived her 
of all means of support. Soon afterwards she applied for a di- 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 85 

vorce and for alimony. He defended, and made a furious but 
perfectly groundless assault upon her character. The trial occu- 
pied a whole week. The result was a divorce but not a cent ot 
alimony, and the child was left to be supported by the wife. She 
obtained a position as a school teacher, which she has ever since 
held ; maintained her child out of her earnings exclusively — the 
miserable, miserly father never contributing a dollar toward the 
support of either the mother or the child. 

In my judgment, the right of a woman to alimony should 
be determined by fixed law. Mrs. Fisk ought to have had fifty 
thousand dollars alimony. It should not be left to the discre- 
tion of a judge to say whether a wife shall have the means of 
living according to her rank in life, or go out of court without 
an assured livelihood, in any case where the husband has prop- 
erty. And I entirely concur with Mr. Ayer, that it is senseless 
for the Legislature to invest a judge with great discretionary 
power, unless Almighty God endows him with wisdom to exe- 
cute that power discreetly. 

It was through no fault of Mr. Ayer that Judge Hoar es- 
caped impeachment for his share in this shameful travesty of 
justice ; for he made an ofiter to the counsel for Mrs, Fisk* to 
contribute liberally to a fund to defray the expense of that im- 
peachment. But the Civil War then engrossed public attention 
to the exclusion of all other topics. 

For Lowell, and for the District, as well as for all his friends, 
it were much to be wished that the Congressional aspirations of 
Mr. Ayer had been gratified. 

No one ever rendered Mr. Ayer any personal service, with- 
out its being heartily appreciated and reciprocated by him. 

*The late J. Q. A. Griffin. James F. Pickering was of counsel for Mr. 
Fisk. It may be proper to add that neither Mr. Ayer nor the present writer 
ever had any personal acquaintance with either party. 



86 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

To Lowell, the home of his adoption, the city of his love, he 
purposed to express his good will by founding a Free Dispensa- 
ry, ■•■' and by other acts of munificence. 

With such gifts as bronze vases, pears, grapes, etc., of the 
choicest varieties, he was frequently attesting to his friends that 
they were not forgotten. f 

OCCASIONAL DIVERSIONS. 

The late Prolessor Aggasiz once said, when declining an 
invitation to lecture, that he had " no tim.e to make money." Men 
who knew but one side of Mr. Ayer, have said that he had no 
time for anything else. But he found time for miscellaneous 
studies ; he found time to enrich his mind by foreign travel ; he 
found time for social relaxation ; and he found time for a variety 
of diversions. He had great humor, enjoyed a joke at any time, 
and loved to play jokes — some of them intensely practical. 

In 1857, a chime of bells was placed in St. Anne's Church 
by contributions from various individuals. Mr. Ayer and his 
brother made a present of the F bell. With his characteristic 
love of fun at other people's expense, Mr. Ayer determined to 
" stir up " the Committee of Contributors by proposing that 

*The City Council has recently established a Free Dispensary, but not 
ou such a scale as was coutemplated by Mr. Ayer. 

fThe acknowledgments which he received on some of these occasions 
were cliaracteristic. Witness the following from Colonel R. B. Caverly :— 
"A thousand thanks to Doctor Ayer; 
For the wine was red, and tlie grapes are fair ; 
And the heart is warm with tender care 

For me and mine. 
Long may he live to heal the race, 
All over the world, in every place, 
Vast benedictions' sovereign grace 
To thee and thine." 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 87 

" Cherry Pectoral and Cathartic Pills " should appear in the in- 
scription upon the bell given by his firm. The committee pro- 
tested that these bells were to chime the praises of Almighty 
God, and not the merits of patent medicines ; and they pro- 
ceeded to have the F bell cast without that inscription. There- 
upon Mr. Ayer affected to feel deeply aggrieved, and threatened 
not to pay for the bell. The committee became divided. Some 
said—" Let Mr. Ayer put anything on the bell that he wants ;" 
others said, " No," and sought to persuade Mr. Ayer to surren- 
der his preferences. Mr. Ayer enjoyed the confusion and em- 
barrassment of the committee greatly. He kept them " by the 
ears" for about three weeks. As long as they said that the 
chosen inscription upon which he pretended to have " set his 
heart," should not appear upon the bell, he insisted that it should. 
But as soon as they consented to his preferences, he promjnly 
yielded to their desires. The following letters relating to this 
teapot tempest were written with as much apparent gravity as if 
the fortunes of an empire were involved : — 

LoAVELL, 12th Sept., 1857. 

George Hedrick, Esq., Samuel Burbank, E.sq., and others — Gentle- 
men : Your note of yesterday, advising us to indulge your prejudices 
and conqiier our own, has been duly considered. If we give a bell for 
the Chime, as we proposed, we shall make it as we should any gift — 
to suit ourselves. If what we oft'er is not acceptable, decline to take 
it, and you may rest assured there shall be no "ill feeling" on our part. 
But you must not charge us with delaying the delivery of the Chime 
here, while that responsibility rests entirely with those who refuse to 
take our bell, or supply the means to pay for another. 

Yours Respectfully, James C Ayek & Co. 

Lowell, 30th Sept., 1857. 

George Hedrick, Esq., and others — Gentlemen : Your note of to- 
day is before us, in which you " conclude, after consultation with the 
contributors of the Chime," to accept our bell with any inscription we 



88 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

please to put upon it. We have never deemed any inscription that 
could be put upon it of any value to us, or of any importance whatever, 
but we would consent to no dictation from anybody (or especially from 
those who attempted it) as to what kind of a gift we should make to 
the public. 

Having no choice ourselves in the matter, and as many of our 
friends are anxious for the Chime to come forward without further de- 
lay, we will accept the bell as you have already cast it, and hand you 
herewith our check for the amount. 

Yours Respectfully, James C. Ayer & Co. 

Not in the least pragmatical himself, he would submit to 
no intermeddling from others. Though ready to receive advice, 
opposition generally made him more persistent in whatever he 
undertook. Often, however, when he had carried his point with 
a man, he would suddenly change good humoredly, and yield all 
that had been asked of him. Many curious illustrations of these 
traits might be mentioned. Once, a man who had bitterly ma- 
ligned him, brought his carriage to a halt, and solicited a contri- 
bution of five dollars for a deserving object. " Not a cent," 
curtly responded Mr. Ayer, driving on greatly nettled by the 
application. 

A few moments' reflection brought a change of mind. 
" There," he said to himself, " that was a worthy object ; I ought 
to have given ten dollars towards it ; but I wouldn't do it, be- 
cause I hated that man. That wasn't right." Thereupon he 
proceeded to atone for his fault by giving ten dollars to another 
object equally meritorious. 

During the time of the "Sons of Malta," he was a constant 
attendant at the Lowell Council of that boiiffe Order. When 
such a man as General Butler or Judge Gardner was to be in- 
itiated, Mr. Ayer attended, and insisted that the candidate 
should be put through the entire ritual in all its rigor. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 89 

He joined the " Knights of Pythias," not understanding that 
they were not an Order akin to that of the " Sons of Malta." 
Having joined, he non-plussed some of the leaders by starting 
most distressing doubts whether Damon became surety for Pyth- 
ias, or Pythias for Damon. He affected to regard it as a serious 
question, and insisted on knowing the authorities for the legend 
in its popular form. 

It is a fact, that Valerius Maxmius, one of the authorities 
for the Pythian legend, whose works survive, leaves the question 
— which of these famous friends became surety for the other — 
dependent upon a matter of declension and construction. His 
account is as follows : — 

De Amiciti.'E Vinculo, quo juncti Externi. 

Hxret animus in domesticis, sed aliena quoque benefacta 
referre, Romanas urbis candor hortatur. 

Damon et Phintias, Pythagoricos prudentia; sacris initiati, 
tam fidelem inter se amicitiam junxerunt, ut, quum altcrum ex 
his Dionysius Syracusanus interficere vellet, atque is tempus ab 
eo, quo, prinsquam periret, domum profectus res suas ordinaret, 
impetravisset, alter vadem s-e pro reditu ejus tyranno dare non du- 
bitarit. Solutus erat periculo mortis, qui modo cervices gladio 
subjectas habuerat ; eidem caput secum subjeccrat, cui securo 
vivere licebat ; igitur omnes, et in primis Dionysius, nova:^ atque 
ancipitis rei exitum speculabantur. A.ppropinquante deinde dcfi- 
nita die, nee illo redeunte, unusquisque stultitiae tam temerarium 
sponsorem damnabat ; at is nihil sc de amici cunstantia metuere 
praedicabat : eodem autem momento, et hora a Dionysio consti- 
tuta, qui eam accepcrat, supervenit. Admiratus amborum ani- 
mum tyrannus, supplicium fidei remisit ; insuperque eos rogavit, 
" ut se in societatem amicitiam, tertium sodalitii gradum ultima 
culturum benevolentia rcciperent." Hae sane vires amicitiae, 
mortis contemptum ingenerare, vitoe dulcedinem exstinguere, 



go REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

crudelitatem mansuefacere, odium in amorem convertere, pce- 
nam beneficio pensare potuerant, quibus peene tantum venera- 
tionis, quantum deorum immortalium caerimoniis debetur : illis 
enim publica salus, his privata continetur; atque ut illarum aedes 
sacra domicilia, ita harum fida hominum pectora quasi quodem 
sancto spiritu referta templa sunt.-'-" 

[TRANSLATION.] 

"Of TiiK Bond of Friendship, in which the Union is 
A Bkothkrhood. 

"The mind dwells upon domestic affairs, but the splendor of 
Rome excites us to refer to the noble deeds of others also. 

"Damon and Phintias, having been initiated into the sacred 
rites of the Pythagorean Society, were united together by 
such strong friendship, that when Dionysius, of Syracuse, pur- 
posed to kill one of them, and he had obtained from him a re- 
spite by which he might return home before he should die, and 
arrange his affairs ; the other did not hesitate to become surety 
for his return to the tyrant. He who was free from danger of 
death, in this way submitted his neck to the sword ; he who was 
allowed to live in security, risked his head for his friend. 
Thereupon all, and especially Dionysius, watched the result of 
this new and uncertain affair. When the appointed day ap- 
proached, and he did not return, each one condemned the 
rash surety for his folly ; but he declared that for himself he did 
not at all doubt the return of his friend. However, at this 
moment, even at the hour determined by Dionysius, he who 
had received the respite, returned, 

"The tyrant, admiring the dispositon of both, remitted 
the punishment of the friend ; and moreover, he requested that 
they would receive him into their society of friendship, as the 



♦Valerius Maximus, Liber iv., cap. 7, ext. 1. Ed. 8vo. Parisiis, 1822. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 91 

third member of the Brotherhood, as the greatest kindness and 
honor. The power of such friendship begets contempt for 
death, is able to break the charm of life, to make the savage 
gentle, to repay punishment with kindness, and to transform 
hatred into love. It merits almost as much reverence as the 
sacred rites of the immortal gods ; for while these preserve pub- 
lic safety, that conserves private good ; and as sacred temples 
are the places of religious rites, so the faithful hearts of men are 
temples of these powers as if filled by a special divine 
influence." 

Mr. Ayer's doubts on this point were only set at rest by an 
examination of all the passages in which Jamblichus, Diodorus 
Siculus, Cicero, Ouintillian, and other Greek and Latin authors, 
refer to this legend. ••■ 

I wonder whether any other millionaire, who was the ar- 
chitect of his own fortune, ever before turned his thoughts away 
from his investments, to look up a question in ancient biography. 

His sense of humor often served him well under circum- 
stances which would provoke other men to madness. When 
Carl Schurz lectured in Lowell, he, with many others, was the 
guest of Mr. Ayer, who was his client. Mr. Ayer gave direc- 
tions to his servant to bring up all the champagne in the cellar, 
and serve it as soon as Mr. Schurz should return after the 
lecture. Accordingly, Bridget, who was unaccustomed to this 
duty, brought up all the champagne, and uncorked it two hours 
in advance ! When the time came to serve it out, the drink 
was, of course, of the most insipid kind. But instead of going 
out and hanging himself in disgust, as many a man would have 
done, Mr. Ayer treated this faux pas of Bridget as a practical 
joke, as did all his guests. 

♦Jamblichus, Vit. Pyth. 33; Diodorus Sicuhis, Fragmenta, Libor x, 3; 
Cicero, Offices, Book 3, chap, x, etc. 



92 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

In 1862, there were in Lowell, as in other parts of the 
North, many persons whose politics were like those of " Hosea 
Biglow :" — " Ez for the war, I go agin it." These persons called 
successive meetings in Huntington Hall upon pretences which 
many of us felt to be false, and for purposes which we regarded 
as unpatriotic and adverse to the war. 

One of these conventions was called at a most critical pe- 
riod in the struggle, and we determined to capture it. The call- 
ers of this convention had selected a former Governor to 
be President, with twelve Vice Presidents from Lowell, two from 
each of the adjoining towns, and a corps of secretaries. The 
captors selected Dana B. Gove for chairman, and G. A. Gerry 
for secretary. But the callers learned of the contemplated 
scheme, and procured three policemen to be detailed to guard 
the platform. It therefore became necessary to the success of 
the captors' scheme, that these policemen should first be cap- 
tured, conciliated or slain. At my request, Mr. Aycr detailed 
the late Jonathan Weeks to act as an "advance picket," to cajole 
these policemen, glide between them to the platform, call the 
convention to order, and put to vote the preconcerted nomina- 
tion of Mr. Gove for chairman. 

A few hours before the convention met, Mr. Ayer informed 
me that he had been talking with some of these callers, and had 
heard them state what they called their principles, and that, on 
the whole, his own sympathies were rather on their side than on 
ours. But he added, " I have taken hold of this thing just for 
deviltry, and I am perfectly willing to sacrifice their princi- 
ples and yojirs, too, for the sake of seeing the farce zvcll played. 
I expect more fun out of this meeting than I ever had among 
the 'Sons of Malta,' and you must see that I aint disappointed." 

Promptly at the appointed time, a procession of dignified 
gentlemen, heavily weighted down with a sense of their own im- 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 93 

portance, as well as of the magnitude of the occasion, moved 
with measured step out of the reception room and into the main 
hall. This procession consisted of those who expected to be 
chosen officers of the meeting, with divers others of eminent 
gravity ; and was marshaled by the person whose dulcimer voice 
was to have called the meeting to order. But no sooner had this 
little column debouched upon the floor of the hall than the call- 
ers saw, to their utter amazement, Mr. Weeks suddenly chasee 
up the platform steps, saying quickly, " Come to order, gentle- 
men, and choose a chairman." The name of Dana B. Gove 
having been shouted by several of the captors, Mr. Weeks said, — 
" As many as are in favor of Mr. Gove say /." Several voices 
answered /, and Mr. Gove instantly took Mr. Weeks' place. 
While the callers of the meeting were gasping for the breath 
which they had lost by the surprise of the moment, Mr. Gerry 
was chosen secretary, and Mr. Gove commenced "a few feeble 
remarks," which he was privately requested to prolong for an 
hour and a half. 

Just at this stage of the proceedings, the late Tappan Went- 
worth reported to Mr. Ayer that a roll of cream-tinted paper was 
projecting (rom the Governor's outside pocket, which doubt- 
less contained a better speech for such an occasion than that of 
Mr. Gove. Mr. Ayer instantly offered a reward of fifty dollars 
to any frolicsome boy who would "convey " that speech from the 
pocket of the Governor to the hand of Mr. Gove, and then 
get Mr. Gove to read it, as a supplement to his own. But before 
a boy could be found to perform this playful prank, the Gover- 
nor went home in a fit of disgust. 

I'o narrate all the incidents of that exciting night would re- 
quire as long as it took to enact them, and I forbear. At a late 
hour the callers of the meeting succeeded in placing ui:)on the 
platform Alpheus R. Brown as a rival chairman. In addressing 



94 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

his side of the house Mr. Brown bowed repeatedly in the atti- 
tude of a boy playing "leap-frog." Mr. Ayer, seeing that this 
afforded a capital opportunity to adjourn the meeting in a roar of 
inextinguishable laughter, sent word to Mr. Gove to leap right 
over Mr. Brown the next time he put himself in the attitude of 
the "frog," and declare the convention dissolved! 

This timely suggestion was, I think, entirely original with 
Mr. Ayer, though Christian, the late crazy King of Denmark, 
actually perpetrated this monkeylike prank on the embassador 
of the King of Naples. Lord Holland, who witnessed this ludi- 
crous feat, discribed it to Lord Macaulay as follows : — 

" One day the Neapolitan Embassador came to the levee, 
and made a profound bow to his majesty. His majesty bowed 
still lower. The Neapolitan bowed down his head almost to the 
ground ; when, behold ! the king clapped his hands on his ex- 
cellency's shoulders, and jumped over him like a boy playing at 
leap-frog.""''-" 

Suffice it to say that the efforts of the captors were crowned 
with entire success. The proceedings of a peace meeting, which 
might have exerted a sinister influence upon the fortunes of the 
Union, were turned into a harmless burlesque, affording infinite 
diversion to those who were present. The only accident of the 
evening — the loss of a fine glossy wig by one of the orators of 
the captors — added to the general merriment. 

Another meeting was afterwards called for the same pur- 
pose. The captors of the former meeting finding it impractica- 
ble to secure the chairman, determined to make sure of the 
chaplain. The callers said it was " a solemn occasion." The 
captors also said it was " a solemn occasion ;" and this being so, 
they concluded to invite Robert Crossley, the city missionary, to 

*Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Lord Micaulay, vol. 1, p. 244. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 95 

attend the meeting, and give his views, at length, on all the 
points that " riled the land." 

The boys of the city, generally, were also invited to assist 
in the proceedings ; and, of course, they came ; and they took 
charge of the meeting from the start. 

As soon as the callers had organized the meeting by putting 
their own candidate in the chair, the boys called vocifer- 
ously for Crossley ; and that gentleman came promptly to the 
front, and commenced to speak. He talked like one frantic. 
His voice was like an earthquake, and might have deen heard 
at the distance of half a mile. The boys were delighted, and 
shouted, " Louder! Louder !" Mr. Crossley raised his voice to 
the utmost pitch ; but the boys, frantic with delight, still shouted, 
" Louder ! Louder ! " The scene beggared all description — Mr. 
Crossley raising his voice to a frightful yell, and three hundred 
boys shouting in a wild, irregular chorus, " Louder ! Louder ! " 

By the time Mr. Crossley had finished, the excitement and 
the merriment were wild and almost hysterical. Nobody else 
on either side felt any inclination to speak; — and thus ended 
another " peace meeting " in universal derision. 

On one occasion, Mr. Ayer entered a sleeping-car in Bos- 
ton, on a night trip to New York, accompanied by his son. He 
was the last to retire ; and his berth was the top berth. Mounting 
it at about eleven o'clock, he found the supply of blankets inad- 
equate. The attendants were invisible just then — and, tor a 
moment, he hesitated what to do. The hesitation was lor a mo- 
ment only. Looking into the berth next below him, he beheld a 
fair-complexioned young man, enjoying a sweet and child-like 
slumber. Instantly, " at the instigation of the devil," he reached 
down ; grasped quietly but firmly the coverlid, blanket and sheet 
of the innocent sleeper ; then peeled oft" all his bedclothes as 
one would peel a bananna, spread them over himself, and was 



96 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

about to lose himself in sleep, when, suddenly, the passenger 
below him awoke, and hallooed vociferously for the porter. 

The porter came, and was received with a volley of male- 
dictions from the irrate passenger. 

"What did you strip my bedclothes off for, you blank- 
blanked rascal .-'" 

"Why, I haven't touched your bedclothes, sir; I was in the 
car forward ; I never did such a thing in my life." 

" You lie, you rascal," rejoined the indignant passenger ; " I 
saw you !" And he proceeded to uncork the vials of his wrath 
on the railroad company — on its rolling-stock — on all its equip- 
ments, and particularly on its porters, who habitually, (as he said) 
stripped their passengers bare during sleep. 

Meantime, the frolicsome millionaire lay low in his berth, 
his sides almost splitting with irrepressible laughter. 

On another occasion, Mr. Ayer took the train for New York, 
intending to stop at Worcester. The train had just passed out 
of the Worcester depot when he discovered that he was going 
beyond his destination. He rose instantly, jerked the bell-rope^ 
stopped the train, and jumped off. It was getting dark, and he 
had scarcely left the train when the conductor, with a lantern 
upon his arm, appeared upon the rear platform of the rear car. 
" Hullo, there ; stop ; come back here," exclaimed the conductor, 
" I'll let you know you can't stop my train like this." 

" Mind your own business, sir," cried Mr. Ayer, enjoying 
the anger of the conductor, but pretending to feel aggrieved by 
his rudeness. 

" I am minding my business," rejoined the conductor, "and 
I'll have you fined and shoved into jail for stopping my train." 

Mr. Ayer enjoyed an altercation of this kind at any time, 
and liked to hear men, who never saw him before, threaten him 
with fines, floggings, and imprisonments. If he had lived in 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 97 

Dublin in the time of O'Connell, he would have delighted to go 
with O'Connell to the market, and hear the great Liberator ban- 
dy geometrical terms with the Irish fishwomen, denouncing one 
as " a blasphemous, truncated parallelopipidon," and vilifying an- 
other as "a rotten, elongated hypothenuse of perdition," etc., 
while they hurled back such epithets as they could command, or. 
slunk out of sight under his sesquipedalian denunciations. 

FOREIGN EXCURSIONS. 

Twice Mr. Aycr went to Europe avowedly to rest — in 1866 
and 1874; but too often, the meaning of "rest" was a change 
merely in the form of his work. His active mind absolutely 
could not be unemployed. In Italy, he explored the ruins of 
Herculaneum and Pompeii as thoroughly as if the exploration 
of ruins were the serious business of his life. 

He generally avoided all the courts of royalty, though he 
had the entree of every court in Europe from London to Con- 
stantinople, and Irom St. Petersburg to Naples. Among the 
prominent men whom he met unofficially, were Bismarck and 
Gortschakoff, for whom, especially the former, he ever after ex- 
pressed profound admiration. 

Some of his foreign letters are admirable compositions. 
They would fill a volume by themselves, and cannot be given 
here. One of them, however, I will quote — written to Mr. Walk- 
er, from Dresden, while the Congressional campaign was ap- 
proaching its crisis, and while the enormous bells of the Cathe- 
dral over his head were " tolling their call to prayer," as he says^ 
unmindful of " who goes to Congress, or who goes into the 
ground : " — 

"I left my writing and went over to hear the marvellous 
music which rolled like balls, as it were, from arch to architrave. 



98 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

and fell like snow-flakes on the ear as gusts from Heaven. I 
thought, of all the men I knew, you would best appreciate this 
wonderful explosion of soft sounds that seem as though they 
were sent from some inspired source away off to man. The Ca- 
thedral has immense arches that catch these volumes of sound 
and throw them back molten into sheets of fire. The voice of 
a baritone in the choir Jeaps from dome to dome and bounds on 
to you as if it were sent to swallow you up to Heaven. 

"The beadles were constantly annoying us with their silver 
canes three inches in diameter and seven feet long, as badges of 
high office, because we were not standing right, or Mrs. and Miss 
A. should not be with the men, &c., &c. ; but we 'no compren ' 
— stood our ground, saw the heavens open and its anthems faU 
like light upon us, for which we blessed the priest that led them." 

Among the results of his first tour was the presentation of 
the statue of Victory, which he made to the city of Lowell, in 
the following letter : — 

Lowell, October 23rd, 1866. 
Hon. J. G. Peaboby, Mayor : 

My Dear Sir : An American in Europe contrasts the abundance of 
statues, columns and productions of art there displaj'ed for the public 
enjoyment, with the paucity of such objects of taste in our own country. 

Among the sculptors of Italy and Germany, I devoted some time 
to find a figure, either in marble or bronze, which I could present to our 
city as a commencement of this kind of ornamentation in Lowell. It 
was a more difficult undertaking than I expected; and the sculptors 
generall}- told me I should not succeed in obtaining a figure adapted to 
any of the localities I described to them, without having it designed 
and moulded in clay, which is a long and costly process, with all the 
risk of its being acceptable when done. 

Nevertheless, I did ultimately find a statue of Victory, designed 
by the celebrated Prussian sculptor, Ilauch, for the king of Bavaria, to 
stand at the entrance of his palace iu Munich. There is a pair of them, 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 99 

one for each side of the way, and I am informed tlie king paid 16,000 
thalers for the two in soft bronze. 

One of them I thonglit appropriate to the eastern corner of Monu- 
ment Square in Lowell. I consulted Professor Gert, who is director or 
superintendent of tire royal bronzes for the palaces of the court of Prus- 
sia, and he Idndly offered to make a drawing for me, adapting it to 
that locality. 

The accompanying drawing is a copy of it, which disposition of the 
statue he says will not detract from, but add to the impression of the 
monument. The figure is a draped woman, with wings, handing forth 
the wreath of victory in one hand, and holding the harvest sheaf of 
peace in the other. It is of heroic size — or larger than life — so as to 
appear life size when lifted on its pedestal as shown in the drawing. I 
obtained permission to have a copy cast for me in what is termed half 
or soft bronze, the material of which most of the statues for the palaces 
and public grounds of Germany are made. It is less costly and less 
durable than the antique bronze, but they claim to get more perfect 
copies in it, and that it is as good for from fifty to one hundred years, 
after which the antique bronze becomes of a deeper, and richer color 
while tliis does not. 

I beg to offer this statue to the city provided the authorities will 
place it on a granite pedestal, in accordance with the design herewith 
and on the locality above mentioned. I will hold myself ready at an}^ 
time to make further personal explanations to your Honor, Mr. Mayor 
or to the co-ordinate authorities of the city, if desired. 
Respectfully, your fellow citizen, 

J. C. Ayer.* 

Writing to one of hi.s business associates, from Geneva, 
late in i<S74, he gives the following advice, which would have 
been wise for him to have followed himself : " Somebody writes 
me you are not well. I enjoin you to take care of your health, 

*The Statue of Victory Avas accepted by the City of Lowell, and was 
dedicated in Monument Square, July 4tli, 1867. See Cowley's History of 
Lowell, p. 210, for Mr. Ayer's speech on that occasion. 



lOO REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

because its loss is often so insidious, that one does not realize 
it at the time. That was my case. But I am well now, and am 
working towards home to take my share of the duties, and en- 
able others to take their recreation. We have had a good time 
in Europe ; but I have enough of it, and want to see home 
again. This Geneva is built like a modern city, like Philadel- 
phia or Boston, and I don't yet find any curious antiquities in it, 
although it must have stood as long as Genoa and other cities, 
that are full of them. The mountains betvveon here and Flor- 
ence were capped with show as we came through." 

At St. Petersburg, in August, 1874, he assisted at a naval 
review and also at an imperial wedding, of which he wrote the 
following graphic account for the Vox PopiUi. 

"Immedialelv after our arrival, we were invited to go to 
Cronstadt and witness a review of the whole Russian navy, by 
the Emperor. Gracefully yielding to the solicitation, we took a 
steamer immediately in the rear of his Majesty's and sailed out 
the thirty miles to the Islands, which are covered with fortifica- 
tions that defend the Neva and this empire from all the world. 
They are strong beyond any description I can give you ; have 
been tried by the English Admiral, Napier, and found impreg- 
nable. In the channel between them were placed all the Rus- 
sian navy in these waters. I should say about forty men-of-war 
vessels and twelve to fifteen monitors. As we passed through 
them the men were arranged on the yard arms, dressed in 
white, and all alike, clear through the line of vessels, farther 
than the naked eye could see. 

"At a signal from the Emperor they all came down at once 
upon deck, so quickly that when we looked for them again not 
a man was to be seen on the fleet in the whole distance. At 
another signal from the Emperor, the forts opened fire on the 
vessels and monitors, which returned it with terrible thundering 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. loi 

reports, but no destruction, simply because the guns were not 
shotted. Having made noise enough to shake all Europe, the 
commander's yellow flag of empire went up, and the rousing 
victory was accomplished to our entire satisfaction ; and I do 
not know that it is of any consequence whether it was satisfac- 
tory to others or not. 

"Having dined sumptuously on our decks, we sailed back 
while the sun of evening was sending its flashes from the gilded 
domes and spires of the great city. Some of these domes, like 
St. Isaac's, are not gilded, but are as large as that on thecapitol 
at Washington, and higher. They are covered with plates of 
solid gold. Of course they throw a brilliant glimmer to a great 
distance. 

"The eldest living son of the Emperor, called (as they 
render it imperfectly in English) the "Grand Duke Lattimer," 
had engaged to marry the Grand Duchess Maria of Mecklen- 
burg, and was expected to arrive here yesterday. We were 
invited to the wedding. No such display has ever been seen 
on our continent, nor can I conceive how it ever may be. 
There is no such material for gorgeous display, our side of the 
ocean, nor is there use for anything of the kind. 

"The Duchess and royal party arrived on the morning 
train at 12 o'clock. They were taken in the carriages of state 
in procession through the city to the Kazan Church, where the 
couple were blessed by the Archbishop of Russia. The 
church is built after the model of St. Peter's in Rome, in that it 
has, like it, two wings, enclosing two acres of ground, which, 
with the wide street in front, makes an open space of several 
acres more, in which were dense masses of people and troops, 
but it was not filled. Abundant space was kept open for the 
parade inside. 

"The procession was made up of troops, the Emperor's 
family and friends. First came heavy masses of troops, foot 



I02 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

and horse, elegantly attired ; then about two hundred horsemen 
on chosen steeds, gaily caparisoned, among whom were Em- 
peror Alexander, his sons, brother, and relatives and friends. 
Immediately behind them came the Queen's carriage and fifteen 
others, all wholly and brightly gilded with gold — not our kind 
of picture-frame gilding, but thick and strong, to appear as if 
solid. Each was drawn by six elegant horses, governed by 
many grooms in full gilded uniform, except the Queen's carri- 
age, which had eight horses, so fiery that they required ten 
grooms to manage them. 

"The Emperor and companions dismounted at the great 
steps of the church and received the ladies as they came. 
When all had alighted, the Bishop came forward, accompanied 
by other priests, all dressed and completely covered with a 
brocade of gold as rich as it could possibly be made. The 
Archbishop's hat was adorned with pearls that must have cost 
many fortunes. The Queen's carriage had more precious 
stones in its crown than I think we have in New England ; at 
any rate, some that could not be bought there. They were, 
however, inferior to those on her person. 

" The Bishop standing on the upper step received the Em 
peror and Empress and all others of the family, who dipped their 
hands in the holy water, crossed themselves, and then followed 
him into the church, where he blessed the bride and groom. 

" The party then came out, re-formed in procession, and 
drove to the Winter Palace, to be received by an invited compa- 
ny of the distinguished men and officers, and more especially 
their ladies. In the platoon of horses next behind his majesty, 
I saw the young Prince Alexis, who visited Capt. Fox, in Lowell. 
As I sat near, he noticed me when passing, and then turned in 
his saddle to inspect me again ; but whether for my beauty or 
some remembrance of our experience together, I shall never 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. [03 

know, for he soon sank in the waves of gold lace that were flow- 
ing around him and rose no more. Mrs. A. and Lilla"'-' went to 
the palace, and I to the church, in order to include in my obser- 
vations the whole display. This was the reception, ending in an 
illumination of the streets in the evening which surpassed by far 
anything of the kind we ever see in our country. 

" The shipping in the Neva, opposite the Emperor's palace, 
was covered with colored lights, to the top of the masts, — mak- 
ing a gorgeous exhibition of colored fire. Twelve large ships 
were ranged in line, in front of the palace, and in addition to the 
steady blaze of their lights all over them to the tops of the 
masts, every few minutes a conflagration burst out, the whole 
length of the decks, of red, blue or white colored fires, each 
color being confined to one vessel, but the several colors were in 
view at the same time. This fire-and-water show was dazzling 
beyond any description I can give you. The streets and squares 
were crowded with dense masses of men, women and children 
until midnight. Perfect order prevailed everywhere. The illu- 
minations in the streets had been wrought into devices, emblems, 
fountains, &c., all of which we could from our carriage examine, 
read and understand by the aid of our interpreter. 

" Nowhere in the world is there a people who use so much 
gold as the Russians. The abundant domes on their churches 
are plated with gold, and shine at a distance like large stars. 
Even the candlesticks by which I am writing appear to be gold. 
Almost every house, and store, and room in the city has a saint 
which is set in gold, and some of the settings are very costly. 
No places are more pretentious with their saints than the rum- 
shops, as we call them at home. In some an extended saint, or 
a number of saints, will occupy one-half the end of the room,. 
always surrounded with gold. 

♦Mrs. Ayer and Miss Ayer. 



104 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

" Coming here in mid-summer we were surprised to find we 
could not stand the weather. I knew the country was far north, 
but did not know it was so cold in summer. We found all wore 
not only thick woollen clothing, but thick, heavy overcoats as 
well. When evening came we were all in a shiver, and at morn- 
ing could not stand the cold. We were obliged to use at once 
our woollen under-clothes, and all other clothing we could get, 
to keep warm nights here, in August. The sun shines a long 
time every day in summer, but so low that it does not impart 
much warmth, and the ice fields of the Arctic, not far off, soon 
.make their influence felt, when it has gone from the horizon. 
All laborers, drivers, everybody, wear long, heavy overcoats that 
come down to their feet, in summer, and must of course provide 
much better protection against the severe cold of winter. This 
is a marvellous country, and its inhabitants are a curious people." 

One of the best stories, which he brought with him from 
Europe, related to the horse-play indulged in by the Prince of 
Wales, at Marlborough House. A few years ago, the Prince 
was staying in a certain house in the country, where a well- 
known member of Parliament (easily recognizable by his white 
hat on the back of his head, and his monstrous pin-medallion 
of the Prince of Wales) chanced also to be on a visit. The 
slavish reverence of the prince, which at that time inspired the 
senator, was a secret to no one, and the subject of much sar- 
casm and laughter among the younger men who lived too near 
rov; Ity to believe in the divinity thereof. One morning, very 
early, just as night was struggling into dawn, a valet suddenly 
and in great haste entered the room of the sleeping senator, 
and exclaimed, excitedly, "I beg your pardon, sir, but his Royal 
Highness would be pleased to see you without delay." Half 
believing that the crown was in danger, and as pleased as 
Punch at the thought that he should have been called upon in 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 105 

such a moment of peril, the senator sprang from the bed, 
hastily robed himself in his dressing-gown, and fled to the door, 
there, alas ! to fall across a string, placed there on purpose, 
headlong into an immense tub of cold water ! Very sensibly 
hiding his discomfiture, he sent for his servant, and left the 
house without delay. A few days afterwards the following 
paragraph appeared in the agony column of the London Times: 
— "If C. S. will return to his loving friends at Scarborough, all 
past oftences will be forgiven and forgotten. — A. E. ""••'•" 

On the fourth of February, 1875, ^^pon his return from his 
last tour in Europe, he was received by more than two hundred 
of his-'friends at the Parker House hi Boston, where he sat down 
with themx to a public dinner. The Mayor (Jewett) made an ad- 
dress of welcome in behalf of the company, to which Mr. Ayer 
made a happy response, though evidently rapt with emotions too 
great for utterance in words. " Such a greeting as this, from 
such a gathering as this," he emphatically declared, " is worth a 
dozen elections to Congress." 

What a tumult of conflicting emotions surged within him, — 
what a torrent of recollections rushed upon his memory, — on 
that day, — the proudest of his life, — when the chief men of his 
own city, and other cities, too, thus came out, spontaneously, to 
greet and cheer him, and bid him a cordial "Welcome Home!" 

Conspicuous in that assembly was the honored and beloved 
uncle, James Cook, — carrying lightly the weight of four score 
years, — who had received him, nearly forty years before, when 
he first stepped down from the stage-coach in Lowell. Others, 
too, were there, who had witnessed his early struggles as a stu- 
dent, his early experiments as a chemist, his later achievements 
as a manufacturer, and his marvellous successes as a capitalist. 

What a contrast between tJten and iiozv ! Then he travelled 
in a rural vehicle, knowing nobody, nobody knowing him ! Now 

*A. E.," of coui'se, means Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. 



io6 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AYER. 

he travelled over a railroad owned largely by himself, in a train 
drawn by a locomotive bearing his own name. Equally striking 
was the contrast between his own condition, prospects, circum- 
stances and environments, then and now. 

THE NIGHT COMETH. 

It seems a cruel destiny that allows a man like Mr. Ayer to 
amass a princely fortune, but "snatches him away" before he 
can enjoy it, and before he has half perfected his plans for mak- 
ing the world better for his having lived in it. But like thou- 
sands of others among the business men of America, he con- 
tracted the vicious habit of over-work, and fell a victim thereto. 
The approaching clouds had been seen by his family for years ; 
at times they had been recognized even by himself; and twice, 
as we have seen, he sought relief abroad. 

His industry was enormous ; he was rarely known to work 
less than twelve hours a day, and often much more. 

What Jules Simon says of President Thiers is equally appli- 
able to Mr. Ayer : — "Many who do not the twentieth part of his 
labor have a look of being overburdened, which was never seen 
on him. He was a master, not only of his mind, but of his 
temper ; not that he could control himself against provocation, 
or that he tried much to do so. If he was offended, or even 
only bored, he did not hesitate to show it. But he never was of 
a saturnine temper. During the most serious crises he had fits 
of gaiety. '•'" '■• ■•'■" Without this liveliness, which came spon- 
taneously, and set him up again in peace and spirits, he never 
covild have sufficed for such crushing toils."-''" 

In the letter from Bonn, already quoted, referring to the 
death of Joseph H. Ely, who had been long associated with him 

*Le Gouvernement de M. Thiers. 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 107 

in business, he says, — " I feel much depressed by Mr. Ely's 
death, but then we have parted with one such man before — Mr. 
Tremlett — and must all part some time. I do not know how we 
can get along without him, but must find the way."---' 

When further toil became impossible, his thoughts often 
turned to his friend of many years, — Horace Greeley, — who had 
already gone to the tomb, shattered by over-strain. He sought 
rest and restoration among the same scenes where Mr. Greeley 
had sought them, and "rusticated" for many months in the 
same house where the founder of the /V//;-/'/;/^ passed to his rest. 

Succumbing finally under a general paralysis, his mind and 
body gradually faded away. He died at last suddenly at Winch- 
endon, July 3rd, 1878. A medical gentleman who visited him a 
few days before his death, after he had lost the use of his lower 
limbs, thus describes his visit : — 

''As we entered the sitting room, we found the patient in 
an easy chair, looking out of the window in the direction of the 
New Ipswich hills, some thirteen miles away. His disease has 
reached the quiet stage, and his demeanor is uniformly calm and 
placid. He turned his still bright eyes upon us as we ap- 
proached him, and held out his hand to us, while a pleasent 
smile lighted up his face. His countenance does not in the 
least indicate either phyiscal or mental suffering ; his appetite 
and digestion are still good ; and we are told that he believes 
himself to be well. His talk is usually rambling and inco- 
herent, though he speaks but little unless addressed. Now and 
then a scintillation of his former sprightly wit flashes out. On 

*Robert T. Tremlett died November 9th, 185t3, aged 32. Joseph H. Ely 
died September 3d, 1874, aged 51. Another of Mr. Ayer's most efficient as- 
sociates, Albert G. Cook, died January 20th, 1879, aged 48. 

His family circle, too, had been invaded by death; his father-in-law, 
Royal Southwick, died September 23rd, 1875, aged 80; and his brother-in-law, 
Henry C. Southwick, has followed him to the tomb. 



io8 REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

the morning we were there, while his attendants were carrying 
him in his chair from one apartment to another, he suddenly 
looked up and inquired, ' What is the fare on this road ?' In 
general, however, his mind as well as his body, is in a quiescent 
state, and both are gradually fading out. The fine mind, once 
so vigorous that it seemed as if no obstacle could conquer it, — 
the indomitable will that could brook no opposition, — the splen- 
did business talent that could organize and manage stupendous 
business transactions for so many years, — are all wrecked by 
the fell destroyer, — disease,- — and the strong, clear-headed man 
has become a child. In his physique he is of rather slender, 
though firm, build. He has a fine though not remarkably 
large head, and a temperament denoting great activity and 
nervous energy. The expression of his features is extremely 
pleasant and mild." 

" The weight of his brain," says Dr. M. G. Parker, who made 
the autopsy, " was fifty-three ounces — some four or five above 
the average. The cerebrum was in proportion to the cerebellum 
as 7 1-6 is to i, conclusively showing the brain to be much above 
the average." 

In one of the many resolutions passed, after his death, by 
the different bodies to which he had belonged, there was one 
which mourns " the loss of a distinguished and esteemed friend, 
a man singularly gifted with vast and various abilities, who, by 
the wholesome reforms which he effected in the management of 
our industrial institutions, as well as by the many private enter- 
prizes which he originated and completed, has made the world 
better for his having lived in it, and established his right to be 
regarded as a public benefactor, as well as the architect of a 
colossal private fortune." 

It is too soon for us yet, — we are too near his own time, — 
to be able to define precisely the place which he will occupy in 



REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 109 

history. Certain it is, that his niche in the National Pantheon 
will be a high one — among the foremost of the self-made men 
and self-made millionaires of his time. 

"Strongly self-reliant, diligent in self-culture, and of in- 
domitable perseverance, the characters of such men are almost 
equivalent to institutions. "'■•'" 

If the question were asked, What was the most marked trait 
in the character of Mr. Ayer .-' I should answer, Not his energy, 
nor his power of will, though both of these were altogether re- 
markable ; but his singular clearness and sagacity of intellect, 
and the lightning-like rapidity with which he habitually reached 
conclusions. Where other men waded to a given result through 
a long process of reasoning, Mr. Ayer seemed to reach it by in- 
tuition. Whether this is called mental clairvoyance, insight, 
or " the divination of genius," certain it is, Mr. Ayer possessed 
it in extraordinary measure. 

A friend once asked him what he considered the principal 
cause of his own success in life. Mr. Ayer replied : "First, my 
own good star ; and second, always adhering to the rule* 
'Undertake what you can accomplish, and accomplish what 
you undertake.' " 

"Tradition seldom embalms a great man's character in its 
totality. It steadily simplifies it, allowing its more fleeting and 
accidental traits to be obliterated, until at length but one or two 
essential characteristics remain. These then become the sym- 
bol of the man and the representative idea by which he is hence- 
forth known." So it will be with Mr. Ayer. But whatever other 
facts of his life or traits of his character are forgotten, one great 
fact will remain ; — one honorable distinction will forever be his : 
— that in all the schemes which he set on foot to enrich him- 
self, he sought, at the same time, always the benefit, and never 
the spoliation, of his fellow-men. 
*Srailes' Life of Steplieusoii, p. vii. 



no REMINISCENCES OF JAMES C. AVER. 

He cherished a rank dislike to the accumulation of wealth 
by means which, although legitimate as the world goes, did not 
promise to supply some want of the human family. 

He therefore never engaged in stock speculation or games 
of chance, although his facilities for doing so were very great. 
He bought to hold — never to sell again. With his versatile tal- 
ents and readiness of application, he could easily have made 
himself one of the kings of Wall Street, and doubtless left a 
fortune far greater than he has. But his principles forbade. No 
enterprise could tempt him, which had not, at its foundation, ei- 
ther the development of some portion of the country, or the 
direct supply of some comfort or luxury to his fellow-men. 

While a Stewart might erect the edifice of his fortune on 
the ruins of hundreds of dry-goods houses ; while a Vanderbilt 
might enlarge his fleets of steamers or his lines of railroad by 
the wreck of other lines ; we may proudly boast that all the en- 
terprises in which Mr. Ayer engaged, were beneficent to all, 
and that he never made a dollar by the ruin of any man. 

The great Florentine historian, Guicciardini, contemplating 
the foreshadowed decline of the city of his birth and of his 
love, observes, with sadness of heart, that "cities and states and 
kingdoms are mortal, and all things at one time or another come 
to an end in some way." For Lowell, too, as for Florence, the 
inevitable hour will strike at last. But as long as the whirr of 
the spindle or the clatter of the loom shall be heard on the 
banks of our noble river, the narrte of James C. Ayer will not 
be forgotten. 

The time will come when, beside the winged "Victory" 
with which he adorned the mall of the martyrs, his own statue 
will arise, in enduring bronze, reminding generations to come 
of the plans which he formed, and the purposes which he ac- 
complished, during his great career of forty years in Lowell. 



REMINISCENCES 



OF 



THE TOWN OF AYER. 



The town of Ayer is one of the most pleasant and most 
prosperous of the inland towns of Massachusetts. It is thirty- 
five miles from Boston, seventeen from Lowell, tw^enty-eight from 
Worcester, fifteen from Fitchburg, and seventeen from Nashua, 
N. H. It has railroad connections with all these cities, and with 
the country at large, by the Boston and Fitchburg", Worcester 
and Nashua, Peterborough and Shirley, and Stony-Brook Rail- 
roads, all of which converge here. The town dates from Febru- 
ary 14, 1 87 1, when the village previously known as Groton Junc- 
tion, covering portions of Groton and Shirley, was incorporated 
by the General Court. ■•'•• 

The town was organized on the sixth of March, 1871, and 
was " inaugurated " by a public dinner, addresses in the after- 

*See Chapter 23 of the Acts of 1871 ; Butler's History of Groton ; Nason's 
Gazatteer of Massachusetts; Chandler's History of Shirley; Green's Bicen- 
tennial Oration at Groton ; Drake's History of Middlesex County, etc. 



114 REMINISCENCES OF 

noon, and a magnificent ball in the evening. The Committee 
of Arrangements contained several gentlemen who had been 
school-mates of Mr. Ayer at Westford Academy, and consisted 
of Abel Prescott, E. Dana Bancroft, B. F. Felch, Harvey A. 
Woods, Abel L. Lawton, P. S. Rich, L. J. Spalding, Jesse 
Angell, Thomas Page, Levi W. Phelps, Dr. E. Willis, Henry A. 
Brown, and A. W. Felch. 

Mr. Ayer was introduced by Mr. Prescott, and received with 
such acclamations of welcome as visibly affected him. When, 
at length, these acclamations ceased, he spoke as follows : — 

ADDRESS OF MR. AYER. 

On the western coast of Scotland, where it slopes into the 
Irish Sea, a river, rising on the mountains of the inner land, 
winds down among the hills, and empties into the P'rith of Clyde. 
From remote times it has been called Ayr, from an old Scotch 
word, "Ayry," meaning an eagle's nest — the river of the eagle's 
nest. Near its mouth and a contiguous harbor, long stood a 
hamlet, which became a royal burg or town, named from the 
river, and now about one-third as large as Lowell — the town of 
Ayr. For more than a thousand years it has been noted in the 
history of Scotland. During the wars of Robert Bruce, it was 
one of his resorts, and was especially favored by him because he 
was there cured of leprosy. Oliver Cromwell made it one of 
the depots and headquarters of his army in his attack upon 
Scotland, and one of his old forts is now the Citadel of Ayr. 

But above all its distinctions, Ayr was the birth-place of 
the poet Burns. And what a poet ! What a voice has he given 
to all the endearments of home ! How (to quote the thought, if 
not the very words, of Mr. Emerson) has he hallowed the cot- 
tage and all it covers — weans and wife, patches and poverty, 



THE TOWN OF AVER 115 

beans, barley, ale, hardship and the poor man's toil. How he 
wraps with tenderness whatever he names, even his bleak leagues 
of pasture, the stubble field, ice, snow, sleet, and rain, brooks, 
birds, mice, thistles and heather. His Bonny Doon, John An- 
derson, my Jo John, Auld Lang Syne, and Highland Mary, roll 
round the world in ever-ringing symphony with what is pur- 
est and best in human nature. His love songs woo and melt 
the hearts of youth and maidens, bring solace to the sorrowing 
and courage to the overburdened by their lot. His inspiration 
has set the affections to music in strains that are immortal. 

No other one man ever made a language classic, but he has 
rendered that Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. The 
name of his home and his beloved river Ayr, was lifted on the 
wings of his pathos, and now the approaching traveller yearns 
to reach the spot his genius has sanctified. 

Along the borders of the sea, in a parallelogram, and sur- 
rounding the town, is a county of the same name — Ayrshire. 

It would weary your patience to hear the history of my an- 
cestors from one ancient John of Ayr, then John Ayr, down 
through the centuries to this Ayer now before you ; through 
their vicissitudes of poverty and plenty — of fortune and misfor- 
tune ; how they have intermarried with England, Ireland, Scot- 
land, and later with the Americans, who are an excellent mix- 
ture of them all. 

My Friends, — you have chosen the name I inherited for 
your town with an extraordinary unanimity, and have thereby 
conferred an honor upon me, the proper acknowledgment of 
which I do not feel able to express. But I beg you to be assur- 
ed that it is fully appreciated, and that it will be gratefully re- 
membered with a lively interest in your prosperity while life re- 
mains to me, and, I trust, beyond that, by my children after 
me. 



ii6 REMINISCENCES OF 

If this name has become noted among the many that are 
worthier around you, that is greatly due to its publicity. May I 
be permitted to state whence that came ? Until within a few 
centuries, all the civilized nations of the globe were pent up on 
the Eastern continent. Two or three hundred years ago, they 
leaked over into this ; few and fearfully at first, then more and 
more, but always in their settlements timidly hugging the Atlan- 
tic coast. Within the last two or three generations, they have 
burst out, as it were, and over-run the vast continents of the 
West. They are now scattered here, and possess these meas- 
ureless stretches of mountains and valleys, hills, plains, forests 
and prairies, with the boundless pampas and mountain ranges of 
South America. 

Former generations lived in villages and towns, thickly set- 
tled together, where physicians were plenty and near at hand. 
Now, the people are widely scattered, in many sections of these 
many countries. For great numbers the timely treatment of 
physicians cannot be had ; over large tracts of country, good or 
competent physicians cannot be had at all. They can not visit 
patients enough, many miles apart, to live by their profession, 
nor can they carry medicines enough with them on horseback 
for their requirements. Hence has arisen in these, modern 
times, a necessity for remedies ready at hand, with directions 
for their use — a present recourse for relief in the exigencies of 
sickness, when no other aid is near. It is a new necessity con- 
sequent upon the changed conditions of human life — a want I 
have spent my years in supplying, and I will tell you something 
of its extent. 

Our laboratory makes every day some 630,000 potions or 
doses of our preparations. These are all taken by somebody. 
Here is a number equal to the population of fifteen cities as 
large as Lowell, taking them every day (for sickness keeps no 



THE TOWN OF AYER. 117 

Sabbaths) not for once only, but again and again, year after 
year, through nearly one third of a century. We all join in the 
jokes about medicines as we do about the Doctor's mission to 
kill, the Clergyman's insincerity, and the Lawyer's cheating. 
Yet each of these labors among the most serious realities of 
life. Sickness and its attendant suffering are no joke, neither is 
the treatment of them. This system of transportable relief, to 
be made available to the people, must keep its remedies fresh in 
their memories. This is done by advertising. 

Mark its extent. An advertisement, taking the run of the 
newspapers with which we contract, (some 1900 annually,) is 
struck off in such numbers, that when piled upon each other fiat- 
wise, like the leaves of a book, the thickness through them is 
si.xteen miles. In addition, it takes some seven millions of 
pamphlets, and twelve millions of circulars, to meet the public 
demand for this kind of information. Our annual issue of 
pamphlets alone, laid solid upon each other, makes a pile eight 
and one quarter miles high. The circulars measured endwise 
reach 1894 miles. These assertions are matters of mathemati- 
cal certainty. Whatever the estimation in which these publica- 
tions may be held here, they reach the firesides of millions upon 
millions of men who do treasure and regard them, and who in 
their trials do heed the counsel they bring. 

Not only over these great Western continents, but through- 
out that other land, so little known to you, under out feet, — the 
Australian continent, — there are few villages as large as this 
which are not familiar with the name you have chosen, and em- 
ploying the remedies that bear it. 

Thus, gentlemen, have I striven in my humble sphere to 
render some service to my fellow-men, and to deserve, among 
the afflicted and unfortunate, some regard for the name which 
your kind partiality hangs on these walls around me. We may 



ii8 REMINISCENCES OF 

look forward with confident hope to the renown you will gather 
under it, and the prosperity which there is reason to trust the 
future has in store for you. Situated as you are here, on one of 
the main arteries between the west and east, between the great 
industries of the plough and the spindle, you must aid in their 
exchanges and thrive with them. Soon, these channels will be 
opened wide, and pouring through your precincts streams of 
men and merchandise that will need your furtherance and must 
contribute to your growth. 

Located here in the centre of New England, to what dear- 
er spot can you turn, that men inhabit ■' Beginning life rich 
with the honors of your mother town, whose influence through 
her schools and her scholars is of itself an inheritance, with 
such examples as Lawrence, Boutwell, Hoar, what may you 
not hope for of usefulness in the councils of the state and na- 
tion .-* 

Contrast your condition with that of the European nations, 
alternately torn and impoverished with wars ; credit it, as you 
may, to the better education of the people, and you will realize 
the value of the example old mother Groton has set you, so 
worthy of your ambition to follow. Build schools for your 
children, and find talent to teach them. Then intelligence and 
integrity, in prosperous and happy homes, will be your sure 
reward. 

Associated, as you have made me, with your weal and wo, 
L wish I might be allowed to contribute from my means, such as 
they are, something towards this first foundation of the public 
good. 

Gentlemen, I have detained you too long. Oppressed with 
the fear, that I do not deserve the distinction you bestow, I pray 
God to make me worthier, and to smile upon you with His per- 
petual blessings. 



THE TOWN OF AVER. 119 

Mr. Ayer's address made a remarkably good impression. 

Chronicles of the town, by Mrs. E. H. Hayward, were then 
read. Toasts were then given, and responded to, according to 
the following programme : 

1. The Town of Gkoton. 
Response by Colonel Daniel Needham. 

2. The Commonwealth. 

Response by Colonel Taylor, Secretary to Governor Clallin. 

3. The Daughters of Ayer. 

Response by the Rev. Crawford Nightingale. 

4. The Militia. 

Response by Adjutant-General Cunningham. 

5. The Historian of Lowell. 
Response by Judge Cowley. 

6. The Judiciary. 

Response by Tappan Wentworth, formerly Representative 
in Congress from the Lowell District. 

7. The Clergy. 

Response by the Rev. B. F. Clark. 

8. The Press. 

Response by George A. Marden. 

No report of these responses (except that of the compiler 
of these pages) could be obtained, which did anything like jus- 
tice to them. They are therefore all omitted, except the fifth. 

REMARKS OF MR. COWLEY. 

In rising to speak to a toast in recognition of the value of 
the local historian, I feel like one who is stepping into the shoes 
of the honored dead. If good old Caleb Butler, who wrote the 
History of Groton, were present here to-day in the flesh, as I 
doubt not he is present in the spirit, — if the laughter which 



I20 REMINISCENCES OF 

General Cunningham's speech has just provoked, has not fright- 
ened the poor ghost away, — it would devolve upon him, of all 
others, to speak to this toast ; and in behalf of the mother-town, 
to bid the daughter-corporation " Hail and farewell." And I 
doubt not he would speak the parting word with such tenderness 
that you would forever be touched with the recollection of it. 

It is eminently fitting that you, the people of Ayer, whose 
town, (to use a naval phrase,) "goes into commission" to-day, 
should remember, at the outset of your municipal career, that 
all that you do, now and hereafter, in your corporate capacity, 
will be recorded in history. The local historian is putting in his 
appearance in almost every town ; and whatever may be your 
acts, motives, aims or aspirations, whether good or bad, they 
will be canvassed and recorded, and condemned or commended, 
at the intelligent and impartial tribunal over which he presides. 
Let the consciousness of this be constantly present in your 
minds, and it cannot fail to exert an ennobling influence upon 
all your conduct. 

The allusion which my friend, Mr. Ayer, has made to the 
fine old Scottish burg of Ayr, has recalled in vivid recollection 
a visit which I had the great pleasure to make, nearly three years 
ago, to that ancient town in the west of Scotland. It was at Ayr, 
as he reminded you, that Robert Burns, the great poet of the 
sentiments, the bard that sung that thrilling song, 

" A man 's a man for a' that," 
(the great Hymn of Democracy, next to the Marsellaise,) was 
born and brought up. It was at Ayr that he knew and loved 
Bonnie Jean and Highland Mary, and sung his loves in strains 
which the world will never let die. Almost everything in that 
old town of Ayr has been enveloped, as it were, in a poetical 
glamour by the inspired ploughman-bard ; and nothing happier 
could occur in this new town of Ayer than the birth and growth 



THE TOWN OF AVER. 121 

of one of those sons of God who are similarly endowed with the 
wealth of genius. 

Among the many objects of interest in Ayr which Burns 
has transfigured and immortalized by associating them with the 
outpourings of his transforming and idealizing genius, are two 
bridges which span the river Ayr, one of them venerable with 
years like that old town of Ayr, the other a creation of yester- 
day like this new town of yours. In Burns's poem on these 
structures there is a colloquy between the old bridge and the 
new, such as we may fancy taking place between that old town 
and this new town, in which the past is contrasted with the 
present, and the lessons learned in by-gone times by the old 
bridge, are recited for the edification of the new. 

What a contrast between that old Scottish town, older than 
history, older than tradition, and this new municipality, just 
starting on the voyage of life ! The men who founded it, and 
the men who made it their abode during many successive gen- 
erations, however prominent they may have been for a time in 
the procession of the centuries, are quite forgotten now. No 
historian has recorded them ; no poet has sung them ; they have 
no more place now in the memory of mankind than those great 
and good Greeks who lived before Agamemnon. 

You, on the other hand, commence your municipal career, 
with no past save what has been recorded in those quaint 
chronicles which have amused us this afternoon. The world is 
all before you. Your history will be just what you choose to 
make it. It is as much within your control as the choice of 
your town name was within your control. And in your choice 
of that name, let me say, you have defied the laughter of fools 
and the criticism of sciolists and cynics. You have, with un- 
usual generosity, taken the name of an enterprising neighbor 
and friend who is still alive, and who, like other living men, has 



122 REMINISCENCES OF 

been, and, as long as he lives, will be, the subject of detraction. 
When a man distinguished for mental, moral or material acqui- 
sitions, has passed from among us, when his name has disap- 
peared from the roll of the living, it is not at all uncommon to 
see that name adopted by a town. Such was the case of 
Adams, of Webster, of Everett, and of Lowell. You have had 
the larger generosity not to wait for the charity which all accord 
to the dead ; but like Lawrence, like Peabody, like Wakefield, 
you have chosen the name of a living man to go down through 
the ages as the patronymic of your town. Mr. Ayer, I am 
sure, will appreciate the extraordinary compliment which you 
have paid him, and will take pleasure and pride in helping you 
forward in the career upon which you have entered. 

I congratulate Mr. Ayer on the honor which you have con- 
ferred upon him in thus linking his name with all the future of 
your beautiful and promising town. If I understand the con- 
ception which Cicero formed of immortality, it is the memory of 
us which survives us in the hearts of those who love us. I 
know that we have derived from Jesus of Nazareth a higher and 
better conception of immortality than that of the Roman sage ; 
but that was something. It inspired him with a noble ambition. 
It filled his soul with lofty aspirations ; it stimulated him to a 
manly life by the promise of the homage of mankind and im- 
mortal fame. 

Of this sort are the homage and the fame acquired by those 
who aid in the founding of states and municipalities, or in the 
up-building of other institutions for the common good. The 
ambition to share such homage, and achieve such fame, — what- 
ever Edmund Burke may say about "the last infirmity of noble 
minds,"— is a laudable ambition. It is the yearning of the 
ethereal spirit in man, not born of earth, but derived from the 
Almighty Maker of men. 



THE TOWN OF AVER. 123 

But I must extend this response no further. In conclu- 
sion, I can express no better sentiment than this : that the 
Massachusetts town of Ayer may be blessed with continual 
prosperity ; that in all the arts, industries and rivalries of peace 
she may outstrip the Scottish town of similar name ; and that 
she may continue to merit, as she does to-day, the same com- 
pliment which Burns paid to his own immortal burg : — 
"Auld Ayr, whom ne'er a town surpasses 
For honest men and bonnie lasses." 

Addresses were made in the evening by Abel Prescott of 
Ayer, and by N. W. Frye, Ambrose Lawrence, and D. B. Gove, 
of Lowell. A grand ball closed the festivities of the day in a 
most enjoyable manner.* 

TOWN HALL OF AYER. 

The Town Hall of Ayer, the gift of James C. Ayer to the 
town which bears his name, was completed in the Autumn of 
1876, and dedicated on the first of November of that year, under 
the direction of a Committee consisting of the three Selectmen, 
E. C. Willard, Alfred Page and C. C. Bennett — and the follow- 
ing citizens of Ayer : Lewis Blood, J. J. Angell, B. H, Hartwell, 
Arthur Fenner and George V. Barrett. Dr. B. H. Hartwell pre- 
sided. 

Frederick F. Ayer, son of James C. Ayer, delivered the 
keys of the edifice, accompanied by the following address : 

*A special evening train from Lowell to A3'er brought Mrs. Aj'er 
and a large nvunber of invited guests, in addition to those who had been 
present during the day. Reporting the festivities of the evening, 
George A. Harden wrote, in the Lowell Courier: — "The entire com- 
pany enjoyed every moment to the full. Twelve o'clock arrived all too 
soon for most of tliose present. We have never attended a festivity 
more enjoyable, or better conducted." 



124 REMINISCENCES OF 

SPEECH OF MR. F. F. AYER. 

"My Friends and Fellow-Citizens : It is not without the 
keenest sensibility of painful regret that I am compelled to as- 
sume the execution of a trust by performing a duty which prop- 
erly belongs to other lips and other hands than mine. This 
cheerful hall, this large assembly, these bright faces buoyant 
with life, only serve to remind me bitterly, that he who raised 
this roof and these walls, and who so much anticipated this 
opportunity to join you hand in hand, cannot be here. It was 
an occasion he had long looked forward to, with the abiding 
hope and intention of being present himself to tell you the 
lasting obligations he is under to the good people of this town. 
My father, deeply mindful of the marked and distinguished 
honor conferred upon him by the taking of his name, has en- 
deavored to record some reco^nization of his exceeding grati- 
tude in the structure we are here to dedicate. 'Tis indeed but 
an insufficient token of his regard for the kindly consideration 
you have shown for his name ; insufficient, because the name 
you have chosen will be handed down "through long genera- 
tions" to mark a prosperous and growing town and city, v^rhile 
these frail walls, yielding to the waste of "cormorant, devouring 
Time," must crumble into dust and become the "formless ruin 
of oblivion." 

This is, however, but the common fate of work that is of 
men. If, in the coming years and present generation, this hall 
shall prove an ornament to the town, and become a useful 
resort for her citizens ; a place where "men most do congre- 
gate," either in pastime or deliberation — the most sanguine 
hopes of its donor will have found abundant realization. I 
have come here to deliver it to you, to be by you consecrated to 
the uses of the future. I can look forward and see assembled 



THE TOWN OF AVER. 125 

here large and intelligent bodies of men, in deliberation over 
some national affair. I can see young men, future statesmen 
yet unborn, making here their first endeavors in a long and 
honorable career of public service. Thousands will gather here 
to listen to the votaries of Science, and keep pace with its rapid 
steps. Others, less numerous, I hope, will come to be told 
how they shall vote. But whether it be to kneel in prayer, 
to listen to the minstrel, or to join the boisterous excitement of 
a campaign meeting, this roof will make no distinction, but 
offer a welcome shelter to all alike. 

Not many years ago this town was but the "forest prime- 
val," affording an occasional resting-place to the wandering 
savage. But obedient to the same law that has governed the 
settlement of our whole country, forests and savages, yicldin'; 
to the blows of a merciless civilization, have disappeared. I;i 
their place are to be seen the village church and school, the 
telegraph and the locomotive, forming the unmistakable nucleus 
of a city. The town has already become a railroad centre, 
shooting its iron bands to the four points of the compass, and it 
is not its destiny to remain stationary. The water-power of 
Groton is not large, but sufificient to give it the impetus and en- 
couragement which is all that industry requires. The water 
power of Lowell was long ago exhausted but with the addi- 
tional aid of steam and railroad facilities, the n".i.nufacturing in 
dustries of the city, having recovered from the paralytic stroke 
of war, are still continuing to increase. Given a very little of 
nature's assistance in the beginning, and "art," the faithful 
"handmaid of human good," will supply the rest. You have 
a direct communication with the north and west ; a rapidly 
increasing population ; public schools, a library and a "town- 
hall." The manufacture of paper and shoes already affords em- 
ployment for a large part of the laboring population. But it 



126 REMINISCENCES OF 

matters not what branch of industry is adopted ; my prediction 
is, simply, that with the advantages ahxady surrounding it, the 
town is destined, at no very distant day, to afford an outlet for 
capital, and become an important seat of manufacture. 

The prophet's dream, lighted by the flame of a vivid imagi- 
nation, would go further, and tell you of a city with extensive 
avenues ; with broad and winding streets shut in by mountain- 
masonry ; its pavements groaning beneath the heavy wheels of 
commercial traffic, and its citizens surging to and fro in great 
masses in the pursuit of toil. He would tell you of its theatres, 
its gardens, and public parks. Interrupt him and ask the fate of 
the town hall, and he replies : " It will pass into history and be- 
come a useless though favorite landmark of the past ; the ground 
whereon it stands will so far exceed it in value, that its place 
will be demanded for another and more profitable edifice. No 
longer large enough to accommodate the wants of the city, the 
council order it to be sold at public auction. Banks and capital- 
ists appear, and the bidding proceeds, but 

' The niiu ispeaks that sometime it was a worthy building,' 
And it is finally 'struck off' to a small body of 'subscribers,' 
lovers of ' the antiquary times,' and saved." 

I now have the honor, on behalf of my father, to deliver 
these keys to the town of Ayer, trusting they may never be used 
to open this hall, save in the cause of truth and justice, and to 
promote the interests of the town. 

To this address George W. Stuart made a brief response. 

COLONEL NEEDHAM'S ORATION. 

Colonel Daniel Needham of Boston delivered an oration, 
relating all the drtails of the negotiation touching this Town 
Hall, and the successive steps by which the enterprise was carried 



THE TOWN OF AYER. T27 

through. From this recital he proceeded to more general reflec- 
tions, of which the following is an abstract in his own words : 

"The ideal Government of the founders of the American Re- 
public is more perfectly symbolized by a Town Hall than by 
any other material structure. The early settlers of New Eng- 
land developed the Town House ; which was, and is, a purely 
American institution ; and, as we understand it, the Town House 
or Town Hall exists in no other country, and dates for its origin 
to the development of civil government in New England. 

The dedication of a Town House was to the fathers as nec- 
essary as the dedication of a meeting-house. The dedication of 
the Town House had for them a great significance. It meant 
for a civil polity what the dedication of the church meant for a 
religious ; the sacredly setting apart, for the people, of a local 
family house, where all persons designated as citizens should 
have an equal voice and vote ; where no citizen should fail of 
recognition, and where upon a common and equal platform all 
could be heard. 

In their grave view of the Town House belonging to the 
town, of every citizen having ownership in it, and directly or in- 
directly helping build it, they appreciated the deep responsibility 
resting upon all for the manner of its use. It was the people's 
Parliament house, not the king's. Therefore, by solemn act, with 
reverence and public notice, it should be consecrated to the pur- 
poses of civil equality. To the men who had left all the institu- 
tions of civilized life, abandoned the homes of their fathers and 
sought new homes in the wilds of America, civil liberty and 
personal equality under the law had a meaning far deeper than 
words could easily speak. 

We go back with pride, pleasure and profit to the deep mean- 
ing" of the New England fathers in the dedication of the Town 
Hall. And to-day we accept this grand building as a pledge of 



128 REMINISCENCES OF 

the people to whom it belongs, that here shall the equality of the 
citizen be maintained and the protection of the town secured, by 
the selection of the best representative men to fill all the elect- 
ive offices within its jurisdiction. 

A fit name of the Government under which we live would 
be a Town Hall Government. Popular liberty has had its first 
protection in the local power which centered, in New England 
communities, in this people's citadel : the Town House. And 
the ideal American Sovereign, originated with the equal right of 
every citizen, to discuss and debate upon a common platform all 
the intricate questions of Government, and to enjoy in common 
with every other citizen an equal vote and influence in the adop- 
tion of every civil constitution and law. 

The Town Hall represents free speech : 

Here shall free speech the people's rights maintain, 
Unawed by tyrants, and unbribed by gain. 

The Town Hall represents the free ballot. This is the place, 
first, to express our view of public policy, and then to cast a vote 
for the man who will the nearest represent that view. 

The Town House represents popular education. The pub- 
lic schools hail from the Town House ; they originated in the 
town meeting ; and the appropriations for their support can come 
from no other source. When that fountain ceases to yield a sup- 
ply, the school-house will be but a monument of departed glory. 

The Town House represents integrity of purpose and agree- 
ment to yield the individual preference to the public good. 

The Town House represents an elastic government ; hu- 
manity made it to meet the wants of humanity. As the Town 
House community grows, so grows the government under which 
they thrive. The people are first in consequence, and the gov- 
ernment has neither value nor significance, except as it adds to 
them in development. 



THE TOWN OF AVER. 129 

To-day, you citizens of Ayer, accept tiiis Town House, in 
part a gift of him for whom your town was named, and in part 
the production of your aggregate contributions to the treasury 
and credit of your town. Here is the building in its grand and 
stately proportions ; an honor to the enterprise of any man or 
body of men, and happily adapted to the uses for which the 
Town House is established. 

Your fortunate town location, commanding as it does the 
most ready communication with all parts of the country, cannot 
fail to give you an extended business and an active population. 
Already in your infancy, you have developed a capacity for 
growth, which you may look upon with pride, and your neigh- 
bors with emulation. 

From less than a valuation of eight hundred thousand dol- 
lars when you took upon yourselves the responsibility of an 
independent organization, and separated yourselves from the 
mother town of Groton, you have approximated to twelve hun- 
dred thousand dollars, an increase of which you may well be 
proud, and which may well stimulate courage to encounter diffi- 
culties of more than ordinary magnitude. 

To-day with as much thrift as the average manufacturing 
town of Massachusetts, and with a growth since your organiza- 
tion far exceeding any town in your neighborhood, you come to- 
gether and by public ceremony perform a great public act. You 
dedicate this Town Hall ; and by the act of dedication, give an 
outspoken promise to be governed by the principles it teaches 
and the public life it comprehends. 

Aye, more. You dedicate and accept it as a great trust, to 
be handed in all its purity of purpose and design to your suc- 
cessors ; and you have called in these guests in attestation of 
this solemn promise. 

They have come from city and town, at your request and by 
your invitation, to witness this solemn compact, which in the 



I30 REMINISCENCES OF 

dedication of this building you make for yourselves and among 
yourselves as the citizens of an organized town, with all your 
sister towns, your state and the nation. 

This is no unmeaning or idle ceremony, which you have 
summoned us to take part in ; and we join you on this glad and 
historic occasion, believing that you fully comprehend the sig- 
nificance of the ceremony and that by it you pledge new and in- 
creased devotion to the freedom of speech, the freedom of the 
ballot, universal education and popular government. 

John S. Colby of Lowell then read the following poem : — 

MR. COLBY'S POEM, 
I. 

Thy graces, Petapawag,"-'-' we would sing. 

And to thy memory strike the sounding lyre ; 
Not as the lover chants his mistress' praise, 

His veins infected with sly Cupid's fire, 
But rather as the loyal son recalls 

With fond affection all his mother's charms, 
As oft he turns his reverential thought 

To her who clasped him proudly in her arms. 

No cold ascetic was she, in her youth. 

When here the tawny Indian band did dwell; 
For when the handsome pale-face hither came 

And wooed her tenderly, with gentle spell, 
She yielded him her heart, her hand, her all, 

(No bridal dower save Nature's rich bequest,) 
And took his name, and GROTONf chose to be 

For better or for worse ; and thus was blest. 



*The aboriginal uaine of the territory first called Grotou. 
tMay 29, 1G55. 



THE TOWN OF AVER. 131 

Ay ! Year by year her blessings have increased ; 

Wealth in unstinted measure hath she gained, 
And, far surpassing hoarded riches great, 

A good name through the land she hath obtained. 
But e'en these gifts less precious are esteemed 

Than seven fair offspring,! circled round her knee ; 
Of whom we greet the youngest here to-day, 

Consummating its christening gleefully. 

II. 

Not in the budding spring, 'neath balmy skies, 

Nor in the torrid heat of summer's day. 
But 'mid stern February's snows and blasts 

Was life conferred upon this favored clay.§ 
What pains of separation Groton felt. 

What tears bedewed the cheeks of Shirley fair. 
Were far outweighed by joy unspeakable. 

That they were now to have a thrifty heir. 

We deem it grand to boast an ancestry 

Who plowed the main and braved the ocean's shock, 
To seek a refuge from Oppression's grasp 

And Freedom's altar rear on Plymouth Rock ; 
We count it fine to reckon our descent 

From heroes whom" the world with honor crowns ; 
But in its pedigree, this happy bairn 

Besides fore-fathers claims tivo molher\\ towns ! 

About its cradle, solemn- faced and wise, 

The Great and General Court did slowly draw, 

And felt its pulse, and quizzed its relatives, 
And finally its birth announced by law. 

JDunstable, AVestford, Littletou, Harvard, Shirley, Pepporell and Ayer. 
§Towu of Ayer incorporated Feb. 14, l.STl. 
llGroton and Shirley. 



132 REMINISCENCES OF 

They stipulated just its size and form, 

Decreed what worldly honors it should wear, 

And warned its friends against much medicine, 
Because the best of doctors is good air ! 

But when arrangements now were finished quite, 

And all was ready to complete the act, ' 
That ancient and perplexing problem rose, 

Which frequently fond parents' minds has racked 
A name the child must have — a noble name, 

Befitting one of origin so high ; 
No common appellation of the throng, 

But worthy of a future heraldry. 

We celebrate the choice its sponsors made. 

In token of New England enterprise — 
In compliment to one whose fame is known 

In every land beneath the azure skies ; 
Whose dauntless will no obstacle o'ercomes"; 

Whose open purse, the poor have often blessed ; 
Whose deeds are not on bloody pages writ. 

But on the hearts of grateful men impressed. 

Like names bestowed of old, with meaning full. 

Be thine to thee, O Youthful, Stalwart Aver ! 
An earnest of a rare prosperity ; 

An omen that of plenty thou shalt share ; 
A prompting to an energetic course ; 

An inspiration to a true success — 
Not for thyself alone, but for Mankind : 

So living, thou to eminence shalt press. 

III. 

How oft have moralists their keen pens dipped 
In acrid ink, to write the dire distress 



THE TOWN OF AYEK. I33 

Which heartless men have scattered o'er the earth, 
To win Ambition's hope, sweet Fame's caress ! 

" By that sin fell the angels," is alleged ; 
And history the sad tale oft has taught, 

That no deed is too cruel for that end, 
No price too costly, if renown be bought. 

The trampling war-horse may his rider bear 

O'er bleeding multitudes, in ghastly heap ; 
The happy home be blasted evermore ; 

The orphan sorrow, and the widow weep ; 
The fruitful earth, predestined e'er to be 

The source of harvests whence all life is fed. 
May cease to smile and yield its golden store, 

And proffer but a cold, dark grave instead ; 

All horrors and all pains may wait on Death ; — 

No tear will start within the Victor's eye ; 
He looks beyond all inhumanities. 

For only Glory can his sight descry. 
O passion of the world ! O fatal spell, 

That, once enthroned within the wretched soul, 
Develops there a frenzy without cure — 

As merciless as Fate — as past control ! 

And what the bauble that is thus secured .'' 

An empty honor : to be known abroad : 
To have their names inscribed among the few 

That were not born to die : perchance abhorred. 
What sacrifice and inequality is this ! 

To barter innocence and hope of grace 
For reputation, which at very most 

Can only on our tomb some flattery trace ! 



134 REMINISCNCES OF 

Turn, now, your gaze from spectacle so gross, 

To weigh with such distinction, howe'er bright, 
That sought by him who benefits his race 

With deeds of daring for the holy Right ; 
Or him who pours from out his treasury, 

Whether of moral force, or glittering gold. 
Blessings for others ; and confess that these 

Are worthier with the great to be enrolled. 

IV. 

We meet to-day within these spacious walls, 

Made beautiful by cunning workmen's arts, 
As Solomon of old and all his hosts, 

To dedicate a shrine with swelling hearts : 
Not reared for worship of the Living God, 

Where low before Jehovah all may kneel, 
But, like to that, this is a votive gift. 

In gratitude designed for common weal. 

Here may no wrong against the poor be wrought ; 

Here may blind Justice poise her equal scale, 
Dealing to none unmerited rebuff, 

Exposing not her ermine pure for sale ; 
Here may glad Freedom find a lasting home 

And rear a progeny of patriots brave, 
Who ever shall espouse the righteous cause. 

As did their sires who slumber in the grave. 

Beneath this roof may eloquence resound. 
Stirring the souls of youth to lofty aim, 

Depict the path of Duty, with its joys, 

And peace and good-will unto all proclaim. 

Ne'er may these virgin walls have cause to blush, 
But often echo utterances grand, 



THE TOWN OF AVER. 135 

Which, borne by gracious breezes far and wide, 
Shall haste the reign of Love through all the land. 

Then scarce less sacred shall this place be deemed 

Than if it witnessed daily prayers ascend ; 
For more acceptable with heaven is he 

Who proves himself to all the world a friend, 
Than he who loudly shouts into the skies 

His own self-righteousness and goodly deeds ; 
An Eye All-seeing marks the ways of men. 

And shallow, outward semblance little heeds. 

This edifice, auspiciously begun, 

To-day accomplishes ; and all is well. 
No more remains except to breathe a prayer 

That here forevermore may fortune dwell ; 
That Ayer, its lovely daughters and its sons 

May realize every dream of future bliss. 
And all their castles, builded in the air, 

Prove tangible and excellent as this ! 

Brief addresses followed by the Rev. Crawford Nightingale 
and B. F. Felch of Ayer, and Cl.arles Cowley, the Rev. Robert 
Court, and N. W. Frye ot Lowell, of which, however, two only 
were reported, and can here be reprinted. 

MR, COWLEY'S REMARKS. 

"Having listened to the address, so modest, so manly, so 
becoming, of the son and representative of the absent donor of 
this elegant and substantial structure ; having listened to the 
thoughtful, philosophical and statesmanlike oration of Colonel 
Needham ; having heard the musical verses of the poet of the 
day, and the delightful strains of the Germania artists, as well 



136 REMINISCENCES OF 

as those of your own town ; I am sure you cannot now be in the 
condition of the insatiate Oliver Twist, who was perpetually 
asking for ' More.' 

In the brief address of the younger Mr. Ayer, the inheritor 
of the name, the blood, the brain and the fortune of him whose 
voice we cannot hear to-day, — and perhaps can never hear again, 
— we have at once the promise and the prophecy of many judi- 
cious public utterances during many coming years. Starting in 
life with all the advantages of education which Harvard can 
afford, alike in her University and in her Law School, together 
with all the advantages incident to unlimited wealth, the highest 
social position, and an unblemished name, — there is no Roman 
god, Terminus, who can now prescribe a limit which he may not 
pass. Unbounded possibilities are before him. 

There is, however, no possibility of pleasure which is not 
closely attended by the possibility of pain. But under whatever 
painful circumstances our young friend may hereafter be called 
to speak, it is not likely he will ever be called up under circum- 
stances so painfully embarrassing as those which exist for him 
here to-day. But I will not dwell on that. 

I am half inclined to dispute one of his suggestions, that 
the time will ever come when these walls " must crumble into 
dust." They seem admirably fitted to defy the tooth of Time, 
and to stand till the great day foreshadowed by the immortal 
painting of Tintoretto, when the race of men shall have disap- 
peared from the earth, and when town halls shall no longer be 
needed. 

There are many points of resemblance between a town and 
an individual. It is thought to be a fortunate thing for any 
young man, or for any young woman, to have a rich uncle to give 
him, or to give her, a farm in the country, a dwelling-house in the 
city, or a check on p bank for five, ten, twenty, or thirty thousand 



THK TOWN OF AVER. 137 

dollars to start with in lite. And they who have no uncle of their 
own, are perfectly justified in adopting any body else's uncle, pro- 
vided he is able and willing to " furnish the stamps," so desira- 
ble at the outset of life. 

I congratulate the town of Ayer on having such an uncle, 
and I congratulate Mr. Ayer on having such an opportunity to 
associate himself with this young town and with this admirable 
town-hall, which will probably bear his name to that posterity of 
which my friend, Mr. Court, will soon have much tc say. 

It has been my fortune repeatedly to pass some days with 
the elder Mr. Ayer at Pleasantville, in New York, in the retreat 
in which he is now seeking rest and the restoration of his health,, 
which has been badly broken by overstrain ; and I will tell you. 
here^ — what I then told him — that I think you paid him a remark- 
able compliment when, — turning from the honored English names, 
which are associated with this region, and from the beautiful In- 
dian nomenclature which still lives upon the rivers and hills and 
in some of our towns, — you took his name, in preference to any 
of these, for your town. He replied warmly that he fully appre- 
ciated the compliment, and expressed his surprise that rich, . 
musical Indian names, like Shawshine or Magunco, had been 
superseded by such English cognomens as Billerica and Ash- 
land. And he made this suggestion, which I think a good one, 
that it might be some sort of atonement for the wrongs done to 
the lied Men by the Whites, as well as an indication of good' 
taste, if we adopted for cities and towns, as we do for our moun- 
tains and streams, the geographical nomenclature of the Indians, 
instead of the names of the cities and towns of the Old World. 

Mr. Cow^ley then regaled the audience with several very 
amusing anecdotes and jokes, interlarded with admirable quota- 
tions from Burns and other poets. These were highly relished 
by all who heard them, except the Rev. Robert Court, whose 
spirit seemed to be " rapt with emotions too great for speech." 



138 REMINISCENCES OF 

It afterwards appeared that Mr. Cowley had prepared no 
speech himself for the occasion, but that, while Colonel Need- 
ham was speaking, he casually saw the head-notes of what he 
thought a capital speech in the hands of Mr. Court. He recalled 
the playful prank which the patron of the town once sought to 
have played by the chairman oi a Lowell " peace meeting," and 
proceeded to play a similar prank on Mr. Court by " tacking " 
the best parts of Mr. Court's speech to his own remarks. ■■'■' 



REV. ROBERT COURT'S REMARKS. 

John Dennis was a well known dramatic author and critic 
about one hundred and fifty years ago. He invented a method 
of producing artificial thunder, for stage effect, of which he was 
very proud. Visiting a theatre, one evening, he heard in the 
piece his favorite way of getting up a storm, and rising in indig- 
nation he exclaimed, with an objurgation which, on account of 
my cloth, I beg leave to omit, " The rascal has stolen my thun- 
der !" So Mr. Cowley has been looking over my shoulder, read- 
ing ray notes, and has given some of my best points in his own 
speech ; and I think it is clear that he has stolen my thunder. 
However the best way, I think, to punish him, will be to prove 
him a false prophet, by refusing to quote a single line from Burns. 

*Tlie ro,a:uish little prank thus publicly played by an ii-reverent lawyer 
upon a gifted clergyman, had to be forgiven by the latter, all the clergy of 
the county, especially those who preach stolen sermons, being found in vio- 
lent sympathy with the lawyer, quo ad hoc. At the grand ball which was 
given in the evening, this lawj^er was seen introducing to this preacher the 
most charming belle in Ayer, whom he had engaged as a partner for the 
preacher in a Schottische. This " peace ofl'ering " being declined, the lawyer 
threw his own arms round the waist of the heUp, and defiantly danced the 
Schottische himself. 



THE TOWN OF AVER. 139 

This is, indeed, a delightful occasion. Everything connect- 
ed with this gathering has been delightful. The music so elo- 
quenily discoursed by the orchestra, has been almost heavenly. 
The Germania Band have outdone themselves. How clear, pure, 
enchanting, were those strains that came from the cornet ! If 
Mr. Shuebruk goes oa improving at the rate he is doing, since 
last I heard him in Huntington Hall, he will soon eclipse all 
competitors, and stand on the proud eminence of peerless abil- 
ity. It has been said that a violin becomes mellowed and sweet- 
ened by long use ; the vibrations of the melodies played on it 
entering into the very fibres of the wood and modifying its tex- 
ture, so that it becomes more and more musical the more it is 
played. In like manner, I hope, the sweet melodies and celes. 
tial harmonies that we have heard to-day may enter into and lin- 
ger long within these rafters, to mingle with and improve the 
music played by all succeeding orchestras that may perform 
within this beautiful hall. Nothing, it seems to me, could be in 
better taste, more graceful and becoming than the remarks of 
Mr. F. F. Ayer, and the manner in which he delivered the keys 
of this edifice on behalf of his absent father. Nothing could 
have been more appropriate than the eloquent and elegant ora- 
tion of Colonel Needham. I trust, however, that Mr. Ayer's 
prophecy of the ruin of this substantial structure will long re- 
main unfulfilled. The people of this town, I trust, will never 
suffer the prediction of the ruin of this house to come to pass. 
They should do with this worthy building as Sir John Cutler did 
with his silk stockings. This worthy knight lived in England 
when silk stockings were a great rarity, when a single pair was 
considered a not unfitting present to such a queen as the great 
Elizabeth. Sir John had only one pair, that he had worn and 
darned, and darned and w^orn, until the entire original texture of 
the stockings had disappeared and there was nought but the 



I40 REMINISCENCES OF 

darning left ; but they were still held by the worthy knight to be 
the same silk stockings, for as thread by thread wore out, so 
thread by thread was darned up, and so without a thread of the 
original pair, their personal identity was preserved. I myself 
have been darned up, I know not how many times, by the mys- 
tic powers of life, wasting away, building up, many and many a 
time, but yet I consider myself almost as good as new. So do 
ye, O people of Ayer, by this house. When a brick drops out, 
put another in its place. If a slate fall off, put another on the va- 
cant spot. If a timber become shaky, put in a solid one instead. 

But there are halls, churches, chapels, cathedrals, in old 
England, that were reared four, five, seven centuries ago, and 
seem almost as strong as ever. There seems no good reason 
why this solid, substantial, old-English style of building should 
not endure equally as well, and defy the tooth of time and the 
storms of centuries, and last tor ages long down the distant fu- 
ture. I am sorry that the donor of this edifice is not here to-day. 
I have seen Mr. Ayer within ten days, and he seemed then to 
be in better health, physically and mentally, than for some time 
past. He spoke with pleasure of the success with which every- 
thing was progressing for this dedication, and said that he would 
have been delighted to be present. I trust that this may be told 
to all his enemies ; for I am sure it will vex them, while it will 
rejoice the hearts of his friends. 

My friends, there can be no nobler ambition than to desire 
to perpetuate one's name by having it attached to a town. It is 
the very best way to have both name and fame remembered in 
after times. Structures, however well founded, crumble and per- 
ish, but towns live ior ages of ages. Here is something by which 
generations yet to come will remember the donor, and bless his 
memory. Once upon a time Ireland had an independent Parlia- 
ment of her own, separate and distinct from that of England ; 



THE TOWN OF AVER. 141 

and if history speak the truth, there used to be some strange 
specimens of human nature in it ; and queerest of the queer was 
Sir Boyle Roche, famed for his comical blunders of speech called 
Irish bulls. Some one had been urging the enacting of a law by 
the argument that it would do good to posterity. Sir Boyle in- 
dignantly exclaimed : " Posterity ! Posterity ! Why should we do 
anything for posterity ? Sure, posterity never did anything for 
us." It was pretty evident, irom the orator's own presence, that 
somebody's posterity had done a good deal for him. How much 
nobler was the utterance of the old man planting fruit-trees, 
who, when asked why he did so, seeing that he could not hope 
either to eat their fruit or enjoy their shade, replied with both 
poetry and reason : " Before I came into life there were 
those who planted fruit-trees, and I have eaten of their fruit, and 
have sat under their shade, and have been refreshed ; and then 
I blessed the hands of those who planted those trees ; and, in 
like manner, when I shall have passed away, these trees that I 
am now planting v/ill have grown up, and there will be those 
who will eat their fruit, and sit under their shadow, and they will 
bless my hands that planted them !" So ought we to rejoice that 
we can pay a part of the debt we owe to those who went before 
us by doing something for those who shall come after us. To do 
good for future generations is one of the noblest of works ; and 
here on this spot has been carried out and consummated a deed 
for which after-generations shall bless the doer. 



APPENDIX 



On Wednesday evening, July 9th 1879, the people of Low- 
ell assembled in Huntington Hall, as already stated in the 
preface. Previous to the meeting, the Bells of St. Anne's 
chimed for half an hour. H. W. B. Wightman called to order, 
and the Rev. Robert Court offered prayer. 

The meeting was organized as follows : — 

PRESIDENT : James Cook, formerly Mayor of Lowell. 

Vice Presidents : — Francis Jewett, Jefferson Bancroft, 
Sewall G. Mack, and J. P. P^olsom, former Mayors of Lowell ; 
James C. Abbott, Peter Lawson, E. B. Patch, and Jeremiah 
Clark, members at different times of the State Senate ; Rev. 
Theodore Edson, U. D. ; Nathan Allen, LL. D. ; Rev. Robert 
Court, John O. Green, M. D., President of the Old Residents' 
Historical Association ; Gilman Kimball, M. D. ; Charles A. 
Savory, M. D. ; Moses G. Parker, M. D. ; John C. Birdseye, 
formerly State Senator of California ; John P. Roberts, Henry 
C. Church, J. Tyler Stevens, P^rederic Holton, Josiah Gates, 
George Stevens, District Attorney, Robert B. Caverly, Erastus 
Boyden, William Kittredge, and A. M. Bartlett. 

Secretaries: — Percy W. Palmer, John S. Colby, Harry R. 
Rice, L. W. Huntington, and Thomas M. Graves. 



144 APPENDIX. 

The American Brass Band discoursed appropriate music 
before and after the other exercises of the evening. 

Upon the platform, with the officers of the meeting, and 
many other invited guests, sat Grand Chancellor Lee and other 
officers of the Grand Lodge of the Knights of Pythias ; and in 
front of the platform sat the members of the three Pythian 
Lodges of Lowell, organized as a military battalion, and wear- 
ing the picturesque uniform of their Order. 

Conspicuous among the guests present were Frederick F. 
Ayer, with Benjamin Dean, member of the Forty-fifth Con- 
gress, and Jacob Rogers, who were associated with him in the 
settlement of his father's estate. 

As the President of the meeting, the venerable uncle of 
Mr. Ayer, recalled that Summer evening in 1836, when his 
deceased nephew, whose life was now under review, came to 
Lowell a stranger and a " carpet-bagger ;" as he recalled the 
successive stages through which that boy had passed, who was 
now " in his narrow cell forever laid ;" — the heart of the old 
patriarch became too full for utterance ; — and he could only, in 
the briefest manner, introduce the speaker of the evening. 

Among the responses received from various distinguished 
gentlemen who had been invited to be present, were the follow- 
ing letters, which are printed here as showing how Mr. Ayer 
was appreciated by those who knew him best and who were the 
most competent judges of character. 

Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 

Executive Department, Boston, July 7th, 1S79. 
Charles Cowley, Esq. 
Dear Sir : 

I am in receipt of your favor of the 5th instant, 
inviting my presence in Huntington Hall, Lowell, Wednesday 
evening, July 9th, on the occasion of the delivery of your ad- 



APPENDIX. 145 

dress on the Life and Labors of the late James C. Aver. It 
would give me pleasure to accept, did not an official engage- 
ment call me to the western part of the State on the day named. 
During a long and pleasant acquaintance with Dr. Ayer, I 
learned to appreciate his great business ability and his many 
e.xcellent qualities, which I doubt not wiil receive an eloquent 
and effective tribute at your hands. 

Yours very truly, 

THOMAS TALBOT. 
The Hundreds (Gkantville,) 4TH of July, 1879. 
My Dear Mr. Cowley : 

I received your kind note, inviting me to be 
present at the meeting of my old neighbors and fellow-citizens 
of Lowell, to hear your discourse upon the life of the late Dr. 
Ayer. I regret that I cannot attend, as I am to be abroad for 
a few weeks. If in my power, I should have been most glad to 
have met my old friends and neighbors, and listened to your 
address. 

I knew Dr. Ayer well while I lived in Lowell. My know- 
ledge of him commenced before he began business for himself, 
and was kept up until I left the city, when he had, by his own 
exertions solely, without help or assistance, established a busi- 
ness as prosperous and successful as any in the country, and by 
which he had even then accumulated a princely fortune. 

He possessed very great capacity, as his success in all his 
many and various enterprises and undertakings very clearly 
shows ; as that success depended entirely upon his own sagacity, 
foresight and efforts, without help from others. I seldom, if ever, 
have known one with greater business capacity, or more fore- 
sight, judgment and sagacity upon all business questions he was 
called to act upon. He was a most remarkable instance of what 
can be done in this country by intelligence, industry and capa- 



146 APPENDIX. 

city. Alone and unaided, he was able to accomplish results most 
remarkable, and build up a fortune among the very largest in 
the country ; and this, too, by his regular business, without resort 
to the hazards and temptations of speculation. 

The results of his labors furnish the best evidence of his 
extraordinary ability, and the best example to all, of what may 
be done by industry, integrity, application and persistent effort. 

Of course, I need say nothing to his neighbors and fellow- 
citizens of his hospitality and public spirit — they all know full 
well, how much he has done for the public welfare. 

Be good enough to excuse this hasty note-, written just as I 
am leaving. Of course, it must be left to you to set forth at 
large the qualities and character of Dr. Ayer. I have no doubt 
you will do it to the acceptance of those who knew him best, 
Faithfully, J. G. ABBOTT. 

12 Pemberton Square, 

Boston, July 6th, 1879. 
My dear Sir : — 

My engagement of public duty as Chief Executive 
Officer of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers> 
rec|uires my attendance at Augusta, Maine, upon the day of the 
meeting for the delivery of your address upon the life and dis- 
tinguished services of Mr. James C. Ayer. I regret exceedingly 
that I am therefore obliged to be absent. 

It seems fitting that a man who has borne so large a part in 
the business, and aided in the prosperity of our city, should 
have something more than a passing notice when he goes from 
us forever. Mr. Ayer's remarkable business ability, his untiring 
energy and devotion to his pursuits in life, hardly ever taking a 
vacation until failing health and age required it, may well be a 
subject for the contemplation of our young men who wish to 
succeed. To say he had faults is only to say he was human. 



APPENDIX. 147 

The grave, as it should do, throws its shadow over them, while 
the estimable points of his character, leading, as they did, to 
high success, should be, as they will be, I doubt not, held up 
as an example for our young men. 

Renewing my regrets, I am, my dear sir, 

Your Friend and Servant, 

BENJ. F. BUTLER. 
Charles Cowley, Esq, 

Lowell, Mass. 

Boston, July 9, 1879. 
My dear Sir : 

Except for the accident that I mislaid your letter of 
the 1st inst., I should have made an earlier reply. 

My acquaintance with Dr. Ayer has left upon me the con- 
viction that he was a person of great energy and of extraordi- 
nary capacity for business. His opinions upon public questions 
were sound, and in his expression of them he was frank, reso- 
lute and consistent. 

You must excuse this brief note, which I write under the 
pressure of engagements. 

Very truly, 

GEORGE S. BOUTWELL. 
Charles Cowley, Esq., 

Lowell, Mass. 

Salem, July 8th, 1879. 
My dear Sir : 

I regret that I cannot be present at the services to 
be held in Huntington Hall to-morrow evening in memory of 
the late Dr. Ayer of your city. I am indeed gratified to know 
that you are engaged in giving formal and permanent expression 
to the feelings which naturally fill our hearts, and lo the views 
which properly occupy our minds, as we contemplate the career 



148 APPENDIX. 

of those who reach high success in any honorable walk in life. 
The life of Dr. Ayer was most remarkable and furnishes encour- 
agement to all who trust and believe that the e.xercise of pru- 
dence, foresight, economy, industry, and systematic purpose, is 
always crowned with an ample reward. It will always be re- 
membered of him, that starting forth in life without the favors of 
fortune, he so conducted himself as to win a high place among 
the prosperous men of this country, and so used his prosperity 
as to give distinction to the community in which his work was 
performed. As an honorable merchant, a good citizen, a faith- 
ful friend, he is richly entitled to the kindest memory of all who 
knew him, and to the grateful remembrance of that active and 
aspiring and thriving people with whom his lot was cast. 
I have the honor to be 

Respectfully, Your Obedient Servant, 

GEO. B. LORING. 
Hon. Charles Cowley, 

Lowell, Mass. 

[TELEGRAM.] 

Boston, July, 9, 1879. It is with great regret I find it 
impossible to attend the meeting to-night in honor of Dr. Ayer. 

N. P. BANKS. 

The absence of General Banks was the more regretted, 
because it was under his administration that Mr. Ayer carried 
through the Legislature some of his bills to correct the abuses 
in the management of our corporations ; and because, upon these 
topics, as well as upon some others, General Banks could speak 
from intimate personal knowledge. Mr. Ayer believed that the 
discourtesy with which Governor Banks and his wife were treated 
at the Prince of Wales' Ball in Boston, and which Robert C. 
Winthrop and lulward Everett promptly rebuked on the spot, 



APPENDIX. 149, 

originated in the support which the Governor gave to his (Mr. 
Ayer's) measures. 

On November ist, i860, he expressed this opinion in a let- 
ter to the New York Herald, in which he recited some of the 
facts, ah'eady recorded in these " Reminiscences," under the title,. 
" Corporation Reforms." 

MR. AYER ON PILOTTFS "GALLILEO." 

The following letter was not at hand at the printing of the 
foregoing pages, in which I have spoken of Mr. Ayer's love of 
Art, Music, Painting, Statuary, etc., and of the plans which he 
had entertained for the benefit of Lowell. 

Munich, (Bavaria,) 30TH Oct., 1874. 

My dear Friend : 

I want to consult you on a matter private to myself 
and wholly confidential. When I was in Europe before, one of 
the most striking and impressive things I saw in Europe was a 
painting in the Cologne Gallery of " Gallileo in Prison." It took 
my breath away. When I saw it again, it had not diminished 
but filled me with emotion. It is a picture 12 1-2 feet high and 
about nine feet wide and is nothing in the world but a tall and 
noble man in prison, for thinking, and still thinking. It is a pro- 
duction of stupendous genius that holds me captive. If I knew 
it would please my neighbors as well, I need not write you. But 
I don't want to make a fool of myself by an infatuation confined 
to me alone. I have seen many valuable and very costly paint- 
ings in Europe, but none that, in my estimation, would equal 
this. The British Government offered $1,000,000, gold, for Ra- 
phael's Madonna in Dresden, which was refused. I should im- 
measurably prefer this picture. 



I50 APPENDIX. 

I contemplated buying it for a present to the city for the 
City Hall, and applied to the authorities at Cologne to know if 
it could be copied. They answered, No — for no money. By in- 
fluence I got them to consent, if the author would — Pilotti, in 
Munich. I wrote him, and got no answer. We then came down 
here, some 700 miles, to see him in person. 

Like picture, like man. He is the Choate of the Artists — 
a skein of nerves, without a frame. At first he answered he 
could not paint or permit the picture to be painted. Finally, he 
saicl — " Your letter gratified my pride. I cannot allow the picture 
to be painted, but I will paint it myself. It will take two years 
at least — may take more." I asked the cost and it was enormous, 
but I found him decided and indisposed to change a dollar. At 
my expression of surprise at the cost, he pointed to a smaller 
picture and said, I am paid 25,000 florins for that — about $1 1,000 
— I do not paint for you for the money, but as a favor. If for 
money, I should not repaint that picture at all. It is my inter- 
est to have it shown to a distant people. 

Now his price, although a large one, is one that I can pay, 
(some thousands of dollars,) and should pay it with pleasure, if 
I could know it would make our citizens a tithe of the gratifica- 
tion it affords me. But if this is merely a cultivated fancy of 
mine, to which they would not respond, then I had rather look 
further for something to please them. I can think of no other 
man, so likely to advise me soundly as you, and therefore apply 
to you for your counsel in the case. M. Pilotti says, I may 
have time to consult at home, and I need to, in a matter of that 
importance. 

It is doubtful if we shall get the picture in two years, if en- 
gaged now, as there is a great amount of work on it, which the 
artist will only consent shall be done by himself. This picture, 
which plowed deeper in 'me than any other, is nothing buj a 



APPENDIX. 151 

stern man in prison, looking intently on the floor of his cell, iij^- 
on the chalk-marks, by which he has solved the motions of the 
globes. Two priests are spying him through his barred window, 
to see that he is still thinking, what they have forbidden. Nothing 
I have seen in this European world of wonders, is so impressive 
or effective upon me. If I knew it could be the same to my 
neighbors, or if it could be had at a reasonable price, I might 
take it without counsel. But as it is, and you are at home, while 
I am isolated from all home influences and counsels, I beg to 
appeal to you for your thoughts and advice in the premises. 

There are so many slips between the best intentions and 
their realization, that I beg these suggestions may I'emain be- 
tween you and me. 

Very truly yours, 

J. C. Aver. 

ROYAL SOUTHWICK. 



Royal Southwick had completed his four score years when 
" the fatal asterisk of death " was set against his name. He was 
born in Uxbridge, in this State, September 9th, 1785, and died 
in Boston, September 23rd, 1875. He was a lineal descendant 
of the Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick whom Whittier has 
celebrated, — who, in the early persecuting colonial times, were 
sentenced to be banished to Barbadoes, and sold as slaves, for 
the crime of professing a belief in Quakerism. The captain of 
the vessel in which they were to have sailed, refused to take 
them ; and they were then whipped at the cart's-tail through the 
streets of Boston. The inherited faith which sustained the heart 
of William Penn, and which inspired the verse of Whittier, never 
lost its hold on Mr. Southwick, nor did he ever forget the semi- 



152 APPENDIX. 

martyrdom which his ancestors suffered for its sake. It was his 
practice through Hfe to attend the yearly meetings of the Qua-^ 
kers in Boston and Newport. His father, his brother and his 
sister were all elders of the Friends' Society. 

In 1826, he married Direxa Claflin, daughter of Major John 
Claflin of Milford, and sister of Horace B. and Aaron Claflin^ 
now of New York. 

In 1829, when the Lowell Manufacturing Company com- 
menced operations here, Mr. Southwick, Alexander Wright, the 
Wilson brothers, and others, moved to Lowell from Medway, 
and engaged in the manufacture of carpets. Mr. Southwick 
took the processes of carding and spinning by contract. He re- 
mained in that company's employ till 1844, and his contract 
proved highly remunerative to him and also to the company. 

In 1844, he visited England, and informed himself thor- 
oughly touching the latest improvements in the various process- 
es of the woolen manufacture, that had been introduced there. 
He then purchased a large interest in the Baldwin Manufacturing 
Company, at North Chelmsford, whose business he conducted 
with signal success for about ten years. He afterwards traus- 
feried his interest to the Wilton Manufacturing Company, and 
successfully conducted the operations of the latter company un- 
til near the opening of the Rebellion. 

Outside of manufacturing, he engaged extensively in other 
operations, and was for some years President of the Merchants 
Bank, succeeding Dr. Pillsbury, and preceding Mr. Hosford, in 
that office. He remained a citizen of Lowell until 1859, when 
he removed to Boston, and continued to reside there until his 
death. During his long abode in Lowell, he was prominent in 
many public movements, and exerted himself strenuously in be- 
half of the Whig party, which, in fulfillment of the dying pre- 
diction of his illustrious friend, Daniel Webster, now lives " only 
in history." 



APPENDIX. 153' 

While cherishing the friendship of Webster, Mr. Southwick 
cherished with still greater fondness the friendship of Webster's 
celebrated rival, Henry Clay. For " Harry of the West" he 
named his first-born son, recently deceased. To secure the prize 
of the Presidency for " Harry of the West," he thought no 
sacrifice of time or money too great. And when, on visiting 
Lowell, in October, 1833, Mr. Clay took upon his knee, and 
blesfsed, and caressed, the boy whom his far-oft^ Lowell friend 
had, named for him, the fond father's "cup of happiness" was 
full.'^[[Endeared°as Henry Clay'lwas'to^him, Mr. Southwick felt 
a natural and just pride, (as a Delegate from Massachusetts tO' 
the 'National Whig Convention of 1840,) in voting for the nom- 
ination of Mr. Clay. But it was written in the Book of Destiny 
that Kentucky's greatest son, (loved and honored, as he was, 
above all others, by millions of Americans,) should never enter 
the Promised Land of Presidential power. Fate, which, with 
grim irony, is forever laughing at the wisest calculations, and 
dashing to the ground the fondest hopes of the children of men, 
passed both Clay and Webster by, and bestowed her laurel crown 
on William H. Harrison. 

In 1844, it seemed that Mr. Clay's hour had come, and the 
interest felt in his election was as great among the Whigs of 
Lowell as among those of Ashland. Mr. Southwick was then a 
member of the State Senate, and seemed likely to become a 
member of Congress. He exerted himself to the utmost for Mr. 
Clay. The telegraph not having been introduced, if the mails. • 
alone were relied on, the Whigs of Lowell would have to remain 1 
during the whole night following the national election in painfull 
doubt whether they had lost or won in the great struggle for 
power. Then, as now, New York was regarded as the pivotal 
State. Mr, Southwick arranged that instantly upon the arrival 
at the Albany depot in Boston of the New York train at ten 



154 APPENDIX. 

■o'clock on the decisive night, a swift horse should bring the re- 
turns with all speed to Woburn. At VVoburn, his own well- 
known horse, " Old Royal," stood ready to receive these returns 
and bring them to the Courier office in Lowell. The Democrats 
ran a similar " pony express" to the \^QissiQW. Advertiser office. 
■•"Old Royal " brought the disastrous news of Clay's defeat from 
Woburn to his master in one hour. The excitement of that night 
-will never be forgotten by those who participated in it, though 
•fivc-and-thirty years have rolled by since it subsided into silence 
.and calm. How grimly and wildly the Democrats rejoiced over 
Mr. Polk's success ! How the Whigs mourned — many actually 
wept — over the final defeat of their idolized Clay ! None wept 
more than Horace Greeley, who, twenty-eight years later, en- 
countered a similar Waterloo. Mr. Southwick could never feel 
such an interest in any later contest. 

Having mentioned his Whigism, it is but fair to state that 
his courage and independence far outweighed his devotion to 
party. With his Quakerism he inherited an earnest opposition 
to human slavery, and a disposition to treat the black man with 
the same respect that he bestowed on the white. It was largely 
through the instrumentality of Mr. and Mrs. Southwick, (for his 
wife always took a deep interest in the Anti-Slavery agitation,) 
that the late George Thompson visited Lowell, while a member 
of Parliament, in 1834, and spoke, and was mobbed in the old 
City Hall ; and he it was who entertained Mr. Thompson and 
William Lloyd Garrison (who accompanied him) at his house. 
It required real courage for any Democratic or Whig politician, 
in those days, to receive such " firebrands " as these into his 
house as his guests. When they returned to Boston, Mr. South- 
wick went with them to the stage-coach office, (for Lowell had 
then no railroad,) and comforted them with assurances as pro- 
phetic, if not as eloquent, as those of Wendell Phillips at a later 



APPENDIX. 155, 

clay, — that their cause would triumph at last, and that they them- 
selves would live to hear " the shouts of the millions they 
had helped to free ! " ■•'■ A few years later, Mr. Southwick in- 
dulged his hospitable disposition in a manner more daring still. 
When Frederick Douglass and Charles Lennox Remond came 
to Lowell and addressed her people in the same hall in which 
Mr. Thompson had been mobbed, Mr. Southwick took them to 
his house in Tyler street, and extended to them the same civili- 
ties to which by courtesy they would have been entitled, had 
they not been " guilty of a skin not colored as his own." In 
spite of the then prevailing prejudice against negroes and aboli- 
tionists, Mr. Southwick, perhaps, lost nothing of official position 
bv showing "the courage of his opinions." In 1833, 1839 ^^^ 
1840 he served as a member of the House of Representatives ; 
in 1841, in the Common Council ; in 1844 and 1845, ^^ the State 
Senate ; and for several years he was Chairman of the Whig 
City Committee. But for many years prior to his sudden death 
he had wholly withdrawn from any form of public service ; his 
last effort in that line dating in 1856, when he sought to secure 
for his friend, the late Tappan Wentworth, a second term of 
Congressional life. 

Mr. Southwick left three sons — Henry Clay and John Claf- 
lin, — New York merchants for many years ; the latter of whom 
appeared as a principal witness for the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher 

*FIo\v strikingly was this prediction fulfilled on the fifteenth of April, 
18G5 ! On that day, Garrison and Thompson did indeed hear the shouts of 
thousands whom they had helped to free, in the city which was, at once, as 
Mr. Thompson said, "the cradle and the grave of Treason, Secession, and 
Slavery !" It was my happiness to participate in those acclamations, and 
afterwards to give an account of them to Mr. Southwick, Avhose huge black 
eyes kindled with unwonted animation at the recital. For an account of the- 
scene in the African Presbyterian Church at Charleston, see Cowley's Leaver 
from a Lawyer's Life Afloat and Ashore, pp. 186 — 189. 



156 APPENDIX. 

in the famous Tilton case ; — and Royal, now of Boston. He also 
leaves two daughters — Mrs. Josephine Mellen Ayer, widow of 
James C. Ayer, and Miss Edna B. Southwick. His wife, also, 
survives him. He was buried at Mount Auburn. 

Mr. Southwick was a subject of great interest to the phren- 
ologist on account of the magnitude of his brain. The circum- 
ference of his head was the same as that of the head of Mr. 
Webster ; and for many years he and Webster wore hats made 
on the same block in Boston. Very few such heads are recorded 
in human annals. Here and there, in the long procession of the 
centuries, larger heads may have appeared than historians or bi- 
ographers have taken notice of, just as, according to Sir Thomas 
Browne, more remarkable persons have been forgotten " than 
anv that stand remembered in the known account of time." A 
few only, even of those conspicuous enough to attract the atten- 
tion of the biographer, have had their cranial dimensions trans- 
mitted to us. In virtue of his bulk of brain, Mr. Southwick de- 
serves to pass into history with Franklin, Webster and James T. 
Brady, among Americans ; Addison, Fox and Sir James Simp- 
son, among Englishmen; Baron Cuvier, Mirabeau and Napoleon 
the First, among Frenchmen ; Dr. Chalmers, among Scotchmen ; 
Pope Leo the Tenth, among Italians ; and Haller, Leibnitz and 
Puffendorf, among Germans. 



ERRATA. 

Page 17, Hue 1, for 18;}.5, read 18:?0. 

Page 53, line 7, the first proper name sliould be omitted. 

Page58, line IG, for road read caual. 

Page 61, bottom line, for legislation read litii^ation. 

Page 123, the date of Nov. 1st, should be Oct. 2Gth. 



NOTICES OF THE PRESS. 

Reminiscences of James C. Ayer, and the Town of 
Ayer. By Charles Cowley. Price, $i.oo. 

We have had opportunity to peruse somewhat carefully this vol- 
ume, and we have found it to possess very much more than ordinary 
interest. It is a somewhat minute sketch of the life of Dr. Ayer, 
whose face and form for j'ears were daily seen on the streets of Lowell. 
Jt begins with a description of his birth-place ; narrates with some par- 
ticularity the events of his boyhood ; and while yet a minor, brings 
him to Lowell. His school-life, his apprenticeship , his entrance into 
'business, are briefly touched upon. Nothing is said of the mere de- 
tail of the business which was the foundation of the colossal fortune 
that he acquired. But considerable space is given to his accomplish- 
ments as a student and scholar, and due prominence is made of his 
familiarity with chemistry, geology and the mechanic ;irts. His many 

• commercial ventures — some of almost gigantic proportions — are given 
'in sufficient detail, but perhaps in no instance are they over-colored. * 

* * * * * Mr. Cowley's book will give the reader new insight 
■into the character of the deceased, and even those who have not been 
•classed among his friends, will feel softened towards him, and will not 
•deny that he was a man of qualities that entitled him to greater dis- 
tinction and more general appreciation than was accorded him during 
the many years he was an active, enterprising, thriving citizen of Low- 
ell. We commend this volume to all who care to learn something more 
of the man than it was possible for them to know while he was one 
among us. — Froin a review by Z. E. Sto7ze, in the Lowell Mail. 

It is a well-printed book of 156 pp., and is written in unusually 
good style, its opening chapter being especially graphic. Dr. Ayer 
filled many prominent positions during his busy life here ; his enthusi- 
astic biographer was one of his active associates, and he revives the rec- 
ollection of many important events, which had been well-nigh forgotten. 
Both friends and foes are treated with vigor, and the author leaves no 
doubt as to the precise point he intends to make. The reader will be 
impressed with the fact that the public really knew very little of Dr. 
Ayer, and came far short of doing justice to his abilities and attain- 
ments outside his regular business, and this conclusion will be entirely 
correct. — Johii A Goodwin^ in the Lowell Vox Populi. 



It contains not only much that is exceedingl ] interesting relative- 
to the subject of the work, but also valuable contributions to contem- 
porarj'^ history. A man who, although little in public life, j^la^'ed so 
important a part in the history of his time and his city as Dr. Ayer 
did, could not fail to have much in his career that it would be of inter- 
est to preserve. His history is thoroughly unique, and whatever may 
be individual opinion as to the virtues or faults of the man, it cannot 
be denied that there is much in his life which may be useful to the 
rising generation. Mr. Cowley's tastes naturally' lead him to the com- 
pilation and preservation of such matters as may be both interesting; 
and valuable in the future. With careful patience he collects his facts, 
and with great industry and a readiness which amounts to a gift, he 
puts them in shape. His history of Lowell, and other works, are well 
supplemented by this biography of one who in many respects was one 
of the most remarkable men whom the city has produced. — George A. 
Harden, in the Loiuell Courier. 

The immense fortune which Mr. A3'er accumulated, the world-wide 
business which his enterprise built up, the radical reforms which he,, 
more than any other man, effected, in the management of the great 
manufacturing corporations of Lowell, and indeed of all New England,, 
and tlie prominence in which he stood (though in a private station) be- 
fore the community for many years, — all called for the preparation and 
publication of some record of his active and eventful career. — Middle- 
sex County Manual. 

The history of a singularly energetic and successful business man 
is related in this volume as an example of New-England enterprise,, 
thrift, [)ublic spirit, and material prosperity. — From an abstract in the 
New YorJc Tribune. 



OTHER WORKS OF THE AUTHOR. 

Leaves from a Lawyer's Life Afloat and Ashore;. 
Just issued. Cloth binding, $1.25 ; paper binding, $1.00. 

The Squadron, of which the author was Judge-Advocate during- 
the Civil War, patrolled the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and Flor- 
ida, and cooperated with the Army of the Department of the South. 
This volume combines all that is most interesting in the history of that 
Squadron and Army, combined with a free criticism touching thp man- 
ner in which Greeley, Lossing, Boynton and others have treated this 
portion of the history of the War. This was the Squadron with which' 
General Sherman united at the close of his march to tlie Sea. 



Mr. Cowley's book is made up of entertaining as well as valuable 
anaterial. As the record of an eye witness, it has a peculiar value in 
vthe literature of the war. — From an abstract in the New York Herald. 

The " South Side View" of this book is unfolded at length in the 
'Charleston News and Courier, which says that it "contains a very 
interesting account of the operations of the Federal land and naval 
forces against Charleston during the late war. The author was Judge- 
Advocate-General of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron during 
the Seige, and participated personally in many of the scenes which he 
describes. He writes with great fairness and in admirable temper, 
and while he does not, of course, disguise his sympathy with the 
Northern cause, he seems wholly free from prejudice. He pays the 
highest tribute to the courage, fortitude and ability which were dis- 
played in the ever-memorable defence of the city. * * * * Our 
author gives a vivid account of the battle of Secessionville, (June 16, 
.1862.) The naval battle of Jauary 31, 1863, when the Confederate 
lams attacked the Federal gunboats off Charleston, is described at 
length. * * * * Judge Cowley gives a full account of the battle 
between the forts and the iron-clads on April 7, 1863, and also of the 
assault on Battery Wagner. His narrative of the various assaults 
upon Morris Island and Wagner forms some of the most vivid pages of 
the book, and he does full justice to the heroic fighting on both sides. 
The fifth and sixth chapters of the book are intensely interesting. * 
* * * The account of the landing in Charleston is full of painful 
interest, and the author's description of the closing scenes of the Great 
Seige is marked by considerable vigor and pictorial power. On the 
whole Judge Cowley's book contains much to interest and little to 
offend, and though to read its pages is indeed infandicm renovare 
•dolorem, it is also to recall many glorious memories and a fame which 
the world will not willingly let die." 

""■Our Divorce Courts: TJieir Origin and History : WJiy 
They are Needed: How They are Abused: And Hozv They 
vtay be Reformed. Just issvied. In paper, Twenty-five cents, j- 

Famous Divorces of All Ages. Cloth binding, $1.25 
paper binding, $1.00. 1878. 

Among other noted men and women whose marital infelicities are 
here recorded, are Charles Sumner, Charles Dickens, Charles O'Conor, 
the Princess de Bauffremont, Daniel Sickels, George Sand, Lord Percy, 
Lord Nelson, Caroline Norton, Mirabeau, the Duchess of Kingston, the 
Duchess of Cleveland, the Countess of Somerset, Patti, Queen Caroline, 
Queen Vashti, Lady Grosvenor, Lady Ross, John Philpot Curran, Dion, 
•Caesar, Cicero, Edwin Forrest, Cardinal Fesch, Phillip of Macedon, 



<^. 



Madame Tallien, "the Victoria WoodhuU of the French Revolution,'^ 
Mary Queen of Scots, Napoleon and his two brothers, Louis and Jerome, 
husband of the late Mrs. Patterson-Bonaparte, Henry VIII., Queen 
Eleonora, Pope Adrian II., Henry IV., John Wesley, and Jane Shore. 

Judge Cowley, who has won distinction in this State'] as an ad- 
vocate in this peculiar branch of his profession, has made an interesting 
book. — Bosto7i Transcript. 

It is said in the preface to Peter Burke's "Celebrated Trials con- 
nected with the Aristocracy," that a knowledge of them "forms, in. 
some measure, a necessary adjunct to the history of the country." 
And the same is true of Judge Cowley's singular series of narratives, 
of which it may be truly said, in the words of another and far greater- 
Burke, that they "exhibit man as he is in action and principle, and' 
not as he is usually drawn by poets and speculative philosophers." 

Historical Sketch of the County of Middlesex. 
Printed in \y\Q Middlesex Co7inty Manual. 1878. Price of the 
"Manual," in cloth, ^i.oo; in paper, fifty cents. 

Browne's Divorce and Its Consequences. 1877. [In 
paper covers, Twenty-five cents. 

"No case has ever occurred, which illustrates so strikingly some 
of the abuses and defects of our present Divorce Code, as that which' 
Judge Cowley has so graphically recorded in this book." 

History of Lowell. Second Revised Edition : Illustrat- 
ed. 1868. Bound in cloth, $1.25. 

Lowell is one of the most interesting subjects on which a man of 
good talents could wish to concentrate his time and attention. 

Such a man is Mr. Cowley, and it is the simplest justice to say, 
that his history of the place of his residence, ( Boston being now his 
principal place of professional practice,) owes much of its unquestioned 
excellence to his capacity to treat of public affairs in a vigorous and 
vivacious manner. His style is clear and strong; He has labored 
most industriously and honestly to bring together, within reasonable 
compass, every thing that can illumine the history of the opulent 
and energetic community of which he writes, and he places that 
history before his readers in a very attractive manner.— ^os^ow Trav. 

Upon receipt of the price set against either of the works 
named above, by the Penhallow Printing Company, by mail 
or otherwise, at 12 Middle Street, Lowell, Mass., a copy wilL 
be forwarded by mail, free of postage, to any address. 

PENHALLOW PRINTING COMPANY,. 
12 Middle Street, Lowell, Mass. 



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